Ingres, the open source database company, claims it’s achieved more than 10x performance gains running data on Intel’s Nehalem chip, well, at least some data.

The breakthrough was made by the VectorWise project, Ingres’ collaboration with VectorWise, a spin-out from the database research team at Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), a Dutch research institute in mathematics and computer science,

VectorWise has created a database engine that Ingres says taps the vector processing potential of modern microprocessors and makes the software faster by running multiple instructions simultaneously.

Ingres says data management technology based on the VectorWise project will let businesses manage their data at highly reduced costs or ratchet their database workloads up.

They will be able to run data analysis tasks that previously weren’t feasible.

Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt claims, “This technology breakthrough will enable a CFO to easily analyze hundreds of millions of business transactions in seconds – even on a laptop at 35,000 feet. This ability to extract deep insights from detailed business data at the ‘speed of thought’ [a dubious benchmark] will empower all leaders to make better business decisions from anywhere at any time.”

VectorWise redesigned the database architecture to exploit vector calculations.

The result is a new Ingres database kernel and reported speed improvements of nearly 80 fold on a query modeled after the Q1 query of the TPC-H3 suite on a Xeon processor.

Intel, which lent a hand, is tickled pink.

Ingres won’t try to commercialize the unproven breakthrough until next year. If Larry Ellison is to be believed, Oracle will have an appliance based on Sun hardware to optimize its database.