Islandia, New York-based Computer Associates Inc says it got its Bs and Qs all mixed up when it told us its CA-OpenIngres 1.1 database release would ship this month (CI No 2,538). It was in the throes of a re-organisation that saw Alan Paller take over as director of open systems and what it meant, it says, is that it would have a beta implementation of 1.1 ready by the end of this quarter on one system. Early 1.1 code will ship to Solaris users by the end of the year, it says. AIX, HP-UX, SunOS and other releases such as the one for Windows NT will follow in that order over the next six months. There are no firm dates for general availability, but customers ought to look at staged releases six months behind the betas – in other words, not before next summer. According to sources familiar with the original schedule, the development unit was intended to have got polished code out of the door by December 1, putting the whole shooting match behind schedule. The news came as part of a six-month report card Computer Associates delivered on its June acquisition, in which it purports for the most part to be ahead of where Ask Group Inc had planned to be by this time. It says OpenIngres 1.1 includes partial back-up and recovery and data compression derived from its CA/Universe database, which was not part of Ask’s product. Computer Associates says there are 26 specific enhancements in release 1.1 ranging from enhanced grant and revoke verbs and declarative referential integrity to outer join support and configurable security auditing. Other enhancements are on their way for CA-OpenIngres Star and CA-OpenIngres/Net. Computer Associates has teamed with Open Database Connectivity specialist Intersolv Corp of Atlanta, Georgia to boost the speed of Windows clients using stuff like Visual Basic for data access.
A quarter ahead of Ask
The company says 1.1 will accommodate up to 500Gb data. Computer Associates’ next relational iteration, OpenIngres 2.0, is still mostly on paper, although there is apparently some code internally. The specifications go before an Ingres user group meet this month. The users will be asked to indicate their preference for several alternative technology approaches Computer Associates is considering for 2.0 and the revised set will go before analysts at the beginning of January. The rest of the industry has to wait until the beginning of February for another white paper that Computer Associates will publish on what will feature in OpenIngres 2.0. Already seen is increased scaling and support for parallel environments including new querying and data loading facilities, mainframe links and multiple dimension indexing. Computer Associates will expand on its development relationship with ICL Plc for Ingres on the parallel Goldrush to encompass other systems, including IBM Corp’s SP2. Computer Associates president Sanjay Kumar said the company will buy and develop additional OpenIngres components. The company has also devised a set of pricing and conversion initiatives it hopes will be enough to maintain Ingres on both vendor and independent software vendor support lists. First, it is waiving fees for converting CA-OpenIngres to new hardware systems and operating systems. Computer Associates says partners will have to begin the job themselves and then turn over the work for subsequent certification. Over and above regular commissions, the company says value-added resellers can claim up to 10% of net licence fees received from sales of CA-OpenIngres and will be paid other quarterly bonuses depending on volume shipped. They will also get back up to 75% of their advertising expenditure on Ingres promotions and will now also be able to resell CA-Unicenter with no additional fees. The company is promising Windows 3.1 and Windows NT versions of its CA-Open Road Windows high-level language by the end of this month and Unix implementations in the first quarter, a quarter ahead of Ask’s plan, the company reckons. Windows 4GL is the graphical application development environment that sits on top of CA-OpenIngres, Oracle, Sy
base and Microsoft SQL/Server. The company claims to have added eight enhancements of its own, and three dozen proposed by users to CA-OpenRoad, ranging from a native Windows look and feel, new editing facilities, debuggers, version creation and multi-database access switching. The high level language does not get Object Linking & Embedding version 2.0 and OCX functionality until the next iteration. A 16-user licence to CA-OpenRoad for Santa Cruz Operation Unix, Windows NT or Windows 3.1 costs from $420. Other Unixes will cost from $1,100. Run-time licences are $250 for all.
