Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.databases Subject: status of Ingres Message-ID: Date: 1 Nov 90 05:06:31 GMT Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 44 I posted a couple of things to this group about 6 months ago that reflected a set of serious problems we had with Ingres. I tried to avoid being critical, but I think my overall dissatisfaction with the state of Ingres 6.x, x < 2, came through. Thus I think it is only fair to note that we've been using 6.3 in an undergraduate database course this semester, and as far as I can tell the problems we saw with early releases of 6 have been fixed. The contrast with last semester is quite striking. We were displeased enough that I was considering moving to another database system. I didn't, because attempts to evaluate alternatives left me with a queasy feeling that we'd be moving from the frying pan into the fire. My attempts to survey the community suggested that Ingres was by far the most commonly used commercial database system in university database courses, and generally people were pleased with it. I'm now glad we stuck it out. We are still having various strange events, but these events seem to be the problems you'd expect with students trying to use a product as complex as Ingres when they have no database experience. E.g. somebody ^Z's a job, starts another job on the same database, and wonders why the system seems to be locked, or two students working on the same database try to destroy the database and retrieve data from it at the same time... The biggest problem seems to be that students now and then report they can't connect to the server. As far as I can tell this is because they tend to have more than one session active at a time, and have simply come up against our configured limit on simultaneous sessions. (They also don't bother to tell the systems staff about these things, or we would have done something.) As far as I can tell, we have had no crashes of the servers (or if we have, they have managed to restart themselves automatically). I'd like to publically thank the local office of RTI for their help in working with the earlier and more problematic releases. What could be done by support, they did. Our configuration is 30 Sun 3/50's and 3/80's with a 3/80 acting as a server. The 3/80 has 16MB of memory and an HP 760 MBbyte SCSI disk drive (of which we are using only half, in order to improve average access time). Now and then we see signs that a bit more CPU power would be desirable on the server, but this configuration seems to be able to handle the load of around 20 students hacking. I'm going to see if we can manage to move to a Sparcstation for the server at some point.