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QUEL's problem was not that it was for the elite but that Relational Technology (later named Ingres) did not have any sense on how to market and sell Ingres RDB
by epalmer 10y ago
QUEL's problem was not that it was for the elite but that Relational Technology (later named Ingres) did not have any sense on how to market and sell Ingres RDBMS and promote QUEL. Oracle's strength has always been marketing and sales and they started to take over the market quickly from Ingres in the first few years of commercial RDBMS.
Yes there were other players in the market at the time but in the very early days it really was Ingres versus Oracle.
For those of us that are older we know that Ingres was a result of Dr. Michael Stonebraker's work at Berkeley. There was at the time a university project known as Ingres and a commercial product known as Ingres. Yes postgres is what happened at Berkeley after Ingres.
I always loved QUEL and was downright pissed when it was ignored over the inferior SQL.
- lukaseder 10y agoWe kind of agree, but from a different angle. I see a product in its entirety: Technology + Community. The latter should extend beyond the technology-affine end user. As you mentioned, Oracle was always better at that. I wasn't alive back then, I only know from listening to the stories. But I'd say that most Oracle customers are rather happy being Oracle customers, while only a select "elite" regrets what happened back then.
- epalmer 10y agoMy memory is failing me at 62 but back then the Ingres community was much more positive about the product than the Oracle community. At one point I was president of the North American Ingres User Group (Association, what did we cann it?). I had moved from using Oracle version 1.x to Ingres 1.x in the beginning because Oracle was so bad. I think that was about 1982 or 1983. But the company (Relational Technology) just had no idea what they had and how to sell it. I'm an Oracle customer today because my shop has a site license. I would use mysql for what I need an RDBMS for today (very light, low volume usage). Oracle is overkill for my work. But it is always available and there are advanced features should I need them.
- woliveirajr 10y agoVHS x Betamax competition was also cruel...