🚀 go-pugleaf

 First, thanks to all of you who replied to my request; some individuals
 went well out of their way to phone me, or simply to take the time to
 talk to me.  

 Second, I received requests from people to forward or summarize the informa-
 tion and opinions I received.  Since the bulk of these were by phone, I'll
 summarize, rather than printing short excerpts. Will try to keep reasonably
 short - tho DBMS's are a "long" subject.

 PERFORMANCE

 My request concerned multi-user perfomance of Ingres, particularly compared
 to Oracle, if possible.  The responses fell into three categories:

  a. "Ingres is a heavy user of resources", "can slow a system to a crawl", 
     etc.  In virtually all cases, these statements came from people who
     have a heavy user load on their systems, aside from Ingres application
     users. Adding Ingres processes to this mix quickly pushes response to
     unacceptable levels;
  b. Most respondents were at VAX sites (most were managers of those sites).
     I asked some of them to guess what the saturation point of their system
     would be, if all the users on their system were running Ingres. 3 out
     of the 4 "guesses" fell into a very consistent pattern:
      VAX 750 - 10-12 users; VAX 780 - apx. 18 users; VAX 785 - 20 to 24 users.
       - no, not very scientific .............
  c. One individual formally compared performance between Ingres and Oracle
     through (what sounded like) a well-thought benchmark set (no, she can't
     release them and I don't have them).
     Her basic conclusions: Oracle runs faster when "small" quantities of data
     are involved; Ingres when "larger" amounts are involved. Once the two
     curves cross, they continue to diverge.  The results were the same,
     regardless of the number of users involved (range of no. of users: from
     single user to simulated 18 concurrent users).

  naturally, discussions went beyond this issue:

  FUNCTIONALITY

   Everyone who discussed features and tools were happy with the extent and
   functionality of them.  Several people mentioned shortcomings in some of
   them. The major ones were: 1. the report writer is somewhat limited; some
   individuals generate several unique reports, which they call in succession
   from an HLI program; 2. retrievals in the HLI cannot be nested.

  SUPPORT

   What impressed me most from the comments I received on this issue is that
   the level of support claimed by people, overall, was better than from any
   other software vendor I have dealt with.  All comments, save one, ranged
   from good to excellent to "beyond the call of duty".  One individual stated
   that she at one time worked in a shop with a Callan system - and that RTI
   went from bad to worse in support - eventually refusing to deal with them
   further.

   A related issue: several individuals mentioned that the AT&T Ingres port
   was executed by AT&T, and is "supported" by it directly - and that neither
   the support or the port is very good.  One person had much the same to
   say about Burrough's port to its OEM'd CT machine - but worse than the 
   case with AT&T.  It doesn't seem that RTI made a very good decision in
   this area, in the long run .............

   Comments re Oracle's support, overall, fell into a more typical bell-shape,
   ranging from poor to very good.  From comments on the net in the last two
   years, it appears the Oracle has improved in this area somewhat.

  ONE LAST COMMENT

   Several people, myself included, received a benchmark "summary" from 
   Oracle, containing a comparison of version 3 Ingres, version 4.1.4 Oracle,
   and a beta release of version 5.0.7 Oracle.  This was executed on VAX
   VMS machines by a company called Nokia Information Systems (Finland). There
   are a number of problems with this "summary" and the benchmark, which I
   won't go into since I can't tell, in all cases, which are benchmark and
   which are "summary".  Naturally, the "summary"/benchmark claims "signifi-
   cant performance improvements (for beta Oracle) over Ingres" - all is
   fair in software vendor wars -  
   HOWEVER, I was told by one person that Nokia decided to buy Ingres. Does 
   anyone know if this is true - and why ?   


    Thanks once again,  greg pavlov, FSTRF, Amherst, N.Y.