At this year’s special interest group meeting for IMAGE users, a glut of good cooks in the e3000’s database kitchen is keeping an IMAGE enhancement stuck in design. The Enchilada proposal first crafted a year ago by SIGIMAGE members got another round of discussion at the SIG 3000 meeting, but no consensus on the metadata delivery vehicle could be concocted. Now the group has voted to publish four alternative recipes to get the enhancement heated up again.

It’s not for a lack of good ideas. Four separate designs on where the metadata for IMAGE/SQL databases might be stored are on the table, according to SIGIMAGE executive committee (SIEC) chair Ken Sletten. Sletten was returned to the leadership of the SIG for the fifth straight year at the all-day meeting.

“We’re basically stuck,” Sletten said. “We’re presented with four options: Enchilada information in the root file; in datasets in the database in question; in a privileged mode file separate from the database; or in another database or databases. The SIEC failed to come to consensus.”

Members of the special interest group, who have HP lab engineers’ ears on what should be developed in IMAGE, agree on the need for the Enchilada. The enhancement is so named because it stands for Enhancement for Caching of Limited Authorized Data, and was first suggested by SIEC member Steve Cooper at a New Mexico meeting of the group in late 1998.

“When we were looking at all the ballot items, it looked like several of them would be much easier to do if there were a place where we could store extra information on the database,” Cooper explained. “A number of items would have been facilitated if this facility were built into IMAGE. It does nothing on its own — but it makes it a lot easier to implement a bunch of other things that were on the SIGIMAGE ballot. We got bogged down on the technical details before we even decided if we wanted this thing or not.”

SIEC member Nick Demos brought the issue before the attendees at this year’s meeting to attempt to break the technical deadlock. “The concept goes against the traditional way of doing enhancements,” Demos said. “We have a whole set of possibilities [with this]. We have to talk about what HP’s posture is on this — will they take something that’s not exactly votable as an enhancement and consider it?”

Tien-You Chen, the database engineer from HP present for all of the day’s discussions with customers, said in reply that he’d gotten clear instructions from his manager Jon Bale. “Before he left, Jon said, ‘Don’t promise anything.’ ”

Sletten noted that 11 items on the current SIGIMAGE enhancement ballot are related to the Enchilada — meaning that if HP were to build the enhancement, those items could be developed more quickly and cost effectively.

Even without consensus, Cooper said the Enchilada might already have accomplished something for HP and e3000 customers. “Maybe we succeeded at one level, in that when Jon and Tien-You go to do these enhancements, if they think out of the box and we’ve communicated the concept and they run with it, maybe we’ve done what we need to. At first it looked like the great unification theory, but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Maybe it’s not the job of the SIEC to solve the [debate].”