OpenIngres comments

Allan Anderson   wrote:
>describe... leading me to wonder, Do Ingres initial releases (like 
>this initial 1.2 release) commonly contain serious (for production) 
>problems like this? Hasn't Ingres got a regression test base??!!! 
>Loading these initial release seems more like a testing effort for 
>the release than an upgrade.
     
        I've noticed this also. The first releases of OI 1.1 and 1.2 were 
     much lower quality than the first releases of 6.3 and 6.4 were. (I 
     won't know about 1.3 when it comes out, because I won't install it 
     until someone else has been suckered into doing CA's beta testing.)
        Quality control seems to be very low on CA's priority list. Here 
     are the three worst examples I've seen. 
        OI 1.1 was released with a bug, an on-line checkpoint (under HP-UX) 
     would take a lock on certain system tables. Anyone using the help 
     facility in an interactive session, and all ODBC connections, would be 
     locked until the checkpoint completed. I'm administering a 20 gigabyte 
     database for a client/server system that uses ODBC for connectivity, 
     so this was not a minor matter to me. Even with four tape drives the 
     users would be locked out for a long time. They got me a patch within 
     a week or two, but when OI 1.2 came out it had the *same* bug, and 
     even though they had fixed it before, this time they were unable to 
     supply a patch for more than three months.
        The first release of Unicenter was pathetic. It looked like a 
     sophomore or junior level project someone had tacked a lot of bells 
     and whistles on. The scheduling part would crash if it was running 
     during the hour when Daylight Savings Time changed, and didn't 
     understand that January 96 comes after December 95. The security part 
     had a huge, blatantly obvious hole in it, so that a hacker could lock 
     your machine without knowing a single password if you used the default 
     settings. All he would need is a login screen and the knowledge that 
     this is a Unix machine with Unicenter security, and you would have to 
     restore your machine from a tape made before the attack. And since the 
     machine wouldn't crash immediately, you could loose days of 
     processing. (I hope they fixed that, but I won't know, because we 
     aren't ever going to use Unicenter. We tried to get our money back, so 
     far with no success.)
        Across the hall from me is the mainframe system's programmer. He 
     has little good to say about CA quality also. One of CA's mainframe 
     products crashed his machine twice in three days, both times during 
     the middle of the workday, right after it had been installed and 
     configured by a (very expensive) CA specialist.
     
     
     Neil Hammar
     hammar@acm.org   {permanent address}
     
     Q: What's the difference between a CA salesman and a used car 
     salesman.
     A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.
                   -Computerworld
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