Re: {Spam?} Re: PostgreSQL History Document

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 11:49:32PM -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Friday 03 December 2004 21:42, elein wrote:
> > ILLUSTRA
> > In 1992, Michael Stonebraker, Gary Morganthaler, Michael Ubell
> > and Paula Hawthorn joined with a small team to create the
> > company Miró. Miró took a branch from UC Berkeley's Postgres
> > source tree and immediately adapted it to use SQL, implemented
> > (fixed) page level locking and a number of other key features.
> > Over the next few years, Miró became Montage and then became,
> > Illustra.
>
> Illustra was the other database I looked at when backending my
> Navi^H^H^H^HGNN^H^H^HAOLserver installation (Illustra and the full text
> DataBlade was extremely well supported by that beast). Just wasn't available
> for Linux.
>

>
> > Relational technology into the existing multi-threaded
> > Informix 7 to produce Informix 9. I was a part of that team.
>
> > With the halt of active Illustra database sales, some of us
> > on the Illustra maintenance team approached Stonebraker with
> > the idea to make the Illustra database open source. Stonebraker
>
> > In 2001, Informix split. Half of the company seceded
> > and formed Ascential. The database portion of the
> > business was sold to IBM.
>
> Any chance anyone inside IBM might be able to make that happen (the
> open-sourcing of Illustra?).
>

Not a chance. I know exactly what happened to the source code and
it is No Longer Available unless someone made off with a copy.
(Unfortunately, I did not. Fortunately, that would have been illegal
so I guess it is best I did not.) I really tried to do my best fueled
by David Gould's enthusiasmand got Stonebraker behind us but the informix
corporate stonewalled us and anyone (except ex-illustra people) at IBM
would not know what you are talkiing about, let alone where to find the
dead and broken server that was the sole repository of code.
Big fish eat little fish and then get eaten by even bigger fish.

> The whole DataBlade mechanism was cool; I forget right off which DataBlade the
> full-text indexer in AOLserver used, but it was working in 1997 very well.

Note that postgres has the datablade "mechanism". It is only a matter of
marketing and packaging. Anything Illustra did could be or is doable by
PostgreSQL.

> --
> Lamar Owen
> Director of Information Technology
> Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
> 1 PARI Drive
> Rosman, NC 28772
> (828)862-5554
> www.pari.edu
>
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