Many business applications and database engines still fail to fully exploit performance advances in multi-core chip design. Ingres hopes to change that for business intelligence (BI) applications. Developed in conjunction with a European research institute and Intel, Ingres’ VectorWise project aims to build high-performance storage and processing capabilities into its open source database to help companies scale up to high-end analytic database processing workloads, but at a low-end price using commodity hardware.
VectorWise is an attempt by Ingres to tweak its core database engine so that it can feed data more quickly to Intel processor chips. In effect, Ingres has rewritten its database kernel to accommodate a new set of algorithms that ensures these chips work as fast as they are designed to.
