The launch of another RISC System/6000 application has followed hard on the heels of last Thursday’s IBM announcement, with Ingres Ltd and Peterborough Software UK Ltd teaming up with IBM to offer a personnel management system based on the Ingres distributed relational database and running on all of the IBM AIX machines, including the System/6000 workstations. Part of the C E Heath Group, Peterborough Software specialises in software for human resources – the rather Orwellian term coined about three years ago for personnel and payroll – and together with Ingres, it expects IBM to do the same in the Unix world as it did for the personal computer – hence the move into AIX to supplement its core business of IBM, ICL and DEC mainframe applications. The AIX 2000 personnel system tracks down staff movements, gives personal records and has facilities for training, performance reviews, manpower information, equal opportunities and industrial relations. Access to the database is restricted by the Ingres security mechanism. A form of referential integrity, which is a way of checking and updating the various relationships within the database, is in operation, so that, in the example given by Ingres, if John Smith is transferred to Department 3 in a company, the database automatically checks to make sure Department 3 actually exists if it doesn’t, an error is flagged. However, Ingres did not confirm whether, in the example given above, the record of John Smith is then automatically removed from his former department. Questions still hang over the actual usefulness of distributed databases, which have the reputation of being slow, and necessarily bring with them an increase in the corporate telecommunications requirement. Jim Barton, manager of the Ingres Partners Group responsible for AIX 2000, argues, however, that the system of optimisation used, which decides automatically what criteria are to be used first to eliminate the number of irrelevant entries from a search, gets over both those problems. While conceding that one central database running on fault-tolerant machines could perform many of the functions equally well, he is convinced that distributed databases will come more into prominence in the future. As far as the market for AIX 2000 is concerned, Thorpe Park, Cambridgeshire-based Peterborough Software is largely targeting UK concerns, and is particularly optimistic about government response to the system. Prices for the AIX 2000 systems will naturally correspond to what IBM hardware is used, and will start at around UKP10,000.
