[comp.os.vms] INGRESS

nieland%falcon.DECnet@WPAFB-AAMRL.ARPA ("FALCON::NIELAND") (09/16/87)

I am looking for information on INGRESS.  How many people out there are using 
it?  How do you like it?  How does it compare to other Database systems.  How 
much does it usually cost?

We are considering it for a large database project.  We have looked at RIM and 
ORACLE, but saw a report that looked pretty good on INGRESS.  

Please send any information to me, I will summarize to the net.

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JMS@MRSVAX.MIS.ARIZONA.EDU (Profitability is the sovereign of the enterprise, Drucker) (09/21/87)

>I am looking for information on INGRESS.  How many people out there are using
>it?  How do you like it?  How does it compare to other Database systems.  How
>much does it usually cost?
     
We've used Ingres (University), Ingres (Commercial), Oracle, Rim,
and System 1032 in a variety of environments here at Arizona.  The
basic answer is that we classify them in three categories:

Good		Ingres (Commercial), Oracle
Mediocre	System 1032
Ugly		Ingres (University), Rim, Rdb

Our criteria, of course, are different from yours.  However, Ingres
and Oracle are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable.  They
are both VERY expensive.  Licensing a good sized VAX like an 8650
will run you somewhere in the $50,000 to $100,000 range (depending
on what features you want, how you want to pay for it, what
maintenance schedule you have, and if you're an educational 
institution or not).  Performance for the two systems, claims of
the vendors notwithstanding, is almost identical.  You can always make
one seem faster than the other, depending on what you're doing.  

System 1032 is a commercially-oriented system that bows (just barely)
to the relational model.  It has better performance then Ingres or Oracle,
but is a pain to program.  The HLI (Host Langauge Interface) is one
step above brain-damaged.  Our benchmarks were done on a 100-200Mbyte
database on a VAXcluster running VMS (fyi). 

Forget Rim or University Ingres. Either will end up with you disgraced
and probably fired.

Rdb is Datatrieve with relational terms.  Your programmers will
love it; your data-retrieval people will hate it.  It takes a guru
to understand the query language.  But it's integrated BEAUTIFULLY
with VMS.  And has a head-start of 12 months on any other product
when new versions of VMS come out.  Rdb/SQL may be part of the answer,
but we haven't had a chance to work with it yet.

If I was asked to recommend a new database system for a new project,
I'd have programmers look carefully at Ingres and System 1032 and pick
whatever they like better.  

Note that there are LOTS of other products out there and my
opinions are ONLY OPINIONS.

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| Joel M Snyder                 |            BITNET: jms@arizmis.BITNET
| Univ of Arizona Dep't of MIS  |          Internet: jms@mrsvax.mis.arizona.edu
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