Ingres launches VectorWise database engine

Ingres' VectorWise is aimed at businesses processing vast quantities of data

Open-source database management company Ingres has launched VectorWise, a database engine which it claims will perform up to 70 times faster than traditional analytical software.

VectorWise is aimed at businesses processing vast quantities of data, including financial and e-commerce firms, telecommunications institutions and web sites, and can analyse information faster than ever before, Ingres claimed.

The software has been tested by 100 Ingres customers and the feedback has been positive, the firm said.

Roger Burkhardt, president and chief executive of Ingres, believes that software companies in the markets listed above have not been taking advantage of their hardware.

"The fact is that current business software was written for hardware which existed 20 years ago," he said.

Ketan Karia, senior vice president of field marketing at Ingres, said that one of the testing customers, an insurance company in the UK, had cut the time it takes to make database queries from 40-45 minutes to just 11 seconds with VectorWise.

In another in-house trial, VectorWise was able to yield search results from "60 million rows in two seconds". Ingres claimed this is 60 times faster than Microsoft's equivalent product, which would complete the search in two minutes.

One of the main differences between VectorWise and other products is that there is no need to tweak data to enable search results to be completed, according to Ingres.

The software is fully automated and operational "out of the box", and requires only someone who knows how to load data into a typical relational database. The data can be loaded using the same table structure using the industry standard Sequel language.

Burkhardt claimed that no new skills, tools, programming languages or interfaces are required for the software to function.

There is no licence fee, only an annual subscription. Burkhardt stated that a two-processor box with four cores would cost around $24,000 (£16,000) a year.

"You could spend up to six figures on a licence fee alone and a server which is four times as much. The cost is substantially lower than other products on the market," he said.

A joint Intel/Ingres white paper confirmed the speed of the software to be between "10 and 70 times faster" than other products.