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Data Storage Linux Business Software

CA Advantage Ingres To Be Released As Open Source 217

Posted by timothy from the a-place-for-your-stuff dept.
Bruce Perens writes "Computer Associates is releasing CA Advantage Ingres as Open Source under a variant of the Common Public License. The press release is here. This is a commercial fork of the public-domain University Ingres of the '80's, probably the first real relational database. CA's product added SQL and in general brought the program up to enterprise quality. So has the PostgreSQL project. It will be interesting to see if there can be any synergies between the two products. The BSD licensing on PostgreSQL would allow it." Here's an article at CRN on this and a few other open source moves announced today by CA; can anyone find a link to the text of CA's "Trusted Open Source License"? Related news, contributed by an semi-anonymous reader, is that CA has established "a new open-source foundation that will support Plone, the content management system built on the free Zope Application server," and that Plone's license will change as a result.
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CA Advantage Ingres To Be Released As Open Source More

CA Advantage Ingres To Be Released As Open Source

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  • Lifecycle of Bad Software (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:11PM (#9243864)
    1. Create bad design

    2. Create bad software

    3. Sell zero copies

    4. Release as "open source" to get attention

    5. No Profit!!

    • Re:Lifecycle of Bad Software (Score:5, Informative)

      by BiggySmallz ( 782582 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:46PM (#9244076) Journal
      This parent post is indeed flamebait, but it very accurately describes the life-cycle of Ingres. I worked for several years at CA, and everybody, internally and externally, knew what a boatload of crap Ingres was. Most of our products were written to SQL Server, although Ingres was free to integrate in, since no one would go near the crap.

  • Oracle was the first SQL relational database .... (Score:4, Informative)

    by molarmass192 ( 608071 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:23PM (#9243950) Homepage Journal
    At least so far as commercial products go, Oracle was the first [orafaq.com]. To save a click, Oracle V1 was a consulting project used solely by CIA and dating back to 1978. Oracle V2 was the first marketed version starting in 1980.

    • Re:Oracle was the first SQL relational database .. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:34PM (#9244019)
      Relational databases and SQL was started with E.F. Codd at IBM. Follow the link for a little history that includes a story of the start of Ingres at Berkeley.

      http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/far/ch6.htm l

    • Re:Oracle was the first SQL relational database .. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Which is amazing, since IBM invented SQL for System R, which was first commercially installed at Pratt & Whitney in 1977. Soon after System R, IBM followed up with SQL/DS (for VM/CMS) and DB2 (for MVS).

      • >
        System R, which was first commercially installed at Pratt & Whitney in 1977

        I'd love to see this straightened out, but I know for sure that the first deployments of System R weren't General Availability, more like beta testing.

        So the argument goes that Oracle was released before SQL/DS reached GA, which is the IBM equivalent of a release.

    • Re:Oracle was the first SQL relational database .. (Score:5, Informative)

      by sapbasisnerd ( 729448 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:46PM (#9244077)
      RTFA, it says Ingres was the first [non-SQL] relational database, and that SQL was added later. Ingres used a Query language called QUEL.

      Now it says that CA added SQL which if I'm remembering isn't true, SQL was in the product well before CA bought it.

      Ingres was made by Relational Technology Inc. (at one point in the early eighties there were three database companies that had names containing "relational" and they all eventually changed their names to that of their product (Ingres, Oracle and Informix).

      I wrote an application in PC-Ingres in 1986 that used QUEL, I stopped paying attention shortly after that as I went to work for Oracle. Then in 1991 when I left Oracle to go to DEC Ingres was on my radar again as we resold it as "ULTRIX-SQL" and obviously by that point it had gained SQL capabilities. Sometime after that Ingres was in financial trouble and got bought by ASK because they had an application that was based on Ingres and felt they couldn't afford to have them go out of business. Later CA bought ASK.

      • Some background info on QUEL [cs.sfu.ca] if anyone is interested.

      • Re:Oracle was the first SQL relational database .. (Score:5, Informative)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @12:22AM (#9244524)
        Ingres was made by Relational Technology Inc

        Actually, it began it's life circa 1974 as a research project at UCB and was originally released with source under a BSD license.

        The more things change, the more they remain the same I guess.

        KFG
      • Ultrix-SQL??

        I thought DEC had their own RDMS, RDB which also ran on Ultrix. In the early days at least, RDB shared its backend with DEC's CODASYL (Hierarchical) DBMS, DBM-32, but it certainly qualified as relational.

      • Re:Oracle was the first SQL relational database .. (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The ingres project was started around the same time as the unichs/unix project. I believe the first commercial unix system outside of Bell labs was for Stonebraker's ingres project.

        At that stage it used QUEL, which was widely regarded as superior to SQL - IBM's query language. Have a read of CJ Date's book for a comparison. It lost out YAVBT (Yet Another Vhs-Betamax Thing).

        SQL, rules, triggers, procedures etc added in late 80's, so by 1991 release 6.0 was technically the top relational db. The query opt


    • The Multics Relational Data Store (MRDS, The French loved the name) was the first commercial database system, marketed by Honeywell on the Multics in 1977. It had an early SQL as the standards bodies churned the standard into shape.


      I know, Oracle was early, but as in so many other things, Multics was first.

  • So many oss/fsf RDBMS... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:23PM (#9243952) Journal
    MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, now "Ingres". I guess it's better than having none, but it's becoming a pain to support the perculiarities of each of these products in, for example, a PHP script intended for general use, which you want to make work with as many different database systems as possible. It's a pity each of them aren't more compliant with the now 12 year old SQL-92 standard or the now 5 year old SQL-99 standard.
    • but it's becoming a pain to support the perculiarities of each of these products in, for example, a PHP script intended for general use, which you want to make work with as many different database systems as possible.

      So don't.

      The database exists to support the application, not the other way around.

    • That's the great thing about standards. There are so many of them to choose from. :) The thing with freedom of choice in software is that it tends to spread things out like this. (For example, there are several different popular choices for desktop environments) That's not without its own advantages, but it kinda sucks for the developers. I can't blame the developers of the packages though from doing things that are non-standard; they're just trying to distinguish themselves, and there is so much else t
    • Without wanting to be nasty, I'd say from a FOSS perspective you'd probably focus on:
      - MySQL (because it's so ubiquitous, fast and solid, although missing some features that would make it a better fit for some uses)
      - Postgres (because it's mature, reasonably fast, solid, been available for a while and broadly comparable with Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 in terms of capability)
      - Oracle/DB2/SQL Server (subject to whether you wanted to deal with commercial databases or not) ...and that's about it.

      Other, totally
      • How about write to the SQL99 standard and have database specific modules while overloads functions which rely on DB specific functionality. This way your design is naturally modular and abstracted. If you design like this problems porting will be greatly minimized. Don't say it can't be done because I did it for a freaking interpreted game engine (NWN) in a C like language, doing it with a real language should be at least twice as easy.
        • Yep, that's a good approach, provided you're prepared to write a good deal of code in your abstraction layer to support MySQL's "differences" compared to other database products.

          On the other hand, if MySQL is going to be 50%+ of your user base, then it might not be the worth the effort.
      • >
        from a FOSS perspective you'd probably focus on: [...] Oracle/DB2/SQL Server

        No, none of these are free software. In dealing with commercial DBMSs, you'd focus on MaxDB (SAPdb), CA Ingres or PostgreSQL, all being free software too.

    • Re:So many oss/fsf RDBMS... (Score:5, Informative)

      by joib ( 70841 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @03:08AM (#9245097)

      It's a pity each of them aren't more compliant with the now 12 year old SQL-92 standard or the now 5 year old SQL-99 standard.

      Not to mention the brand spanking new SQL:2003 standard, see e.g. this overview of the new features [acm.org].
      • Hmm, at first I thought the date of the sql:2003 std. paper was april 1st, but it is march 1st. It is quite amusing: partly it consists of stuff already in oracle for years, partly it is actually useful (the multiset and casting types, also already possible in oracle by the way) and the rest is crap (the create table 'like' for example).

        Hard to believe that this is an official sql standard.
    • a pain to support the perculiarities of each of these products in, for example, a PHP script intended for general use

      It's more a problem with PHP than with anything else - failure to have a unified DBMS driver as about every other scripting language does.

    • There is no free software RDBMS. The only current RDBMS is Alphora Dataphor, but it is not free. Remember, SQL is not conformant to the Relational Model.

      Ingres did have a relational interface, QUEL. I haven't been able to discover if QUEL is still supported, but even if it is and if it was not corrupted, Ingres wouldn't be an RDBMS because SQL access to data violates the RM.

  • Why not PostgreSQL? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RuneB ( 170521 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:24PM (#9243953)
    Why would someone want to use this instead of PostgreSQL?

    • Re:Why not PostgreSQL? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by molarmass192 ( 608071 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:28PM (#9243984) Homepage Journal
      The only reason I can think is that Ingres was at one time one of the big 4, namely Oracle, Sybase, DB2, and Ingres. It comes from a commercial heritage, so it might be an easier sell to Joe CIO?

    • Re:Why not PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:29PM (#9243990)
      You wouldn't. The source code is so that existing legacy customers can fix their own bugs.

    • Re:Why not PostgreSQL? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Monday May 24, 2004 @11:07PM (#9244175)
      Because "Ingres" is easy to pronounce?

      (Okay, on preview I realize that it's not actually easy to pronounce at all unless you too an art appreciation class in college. It's "On-gur." Oh, well. It's still easier to pronounce than PostgreSQL, which despite being my favorite database I can't tell anybody about because I can't say the damn name without feeling like a moron.)

    • Re:Why not PostgreSQL? (Score:2, Informative)

      by crimbil ( 702153 )
      Because quite a few of CA's products use either Ingres or MS SQL. With CA releasing more apps which can be hosted on linux as well as firms which use Windows but don't want to pay for MS SQL, more people are using Ingres. So, by going open source, that relieves some of the load on internal developers. I suppose it could also be argued that now Ingres will be improved without CA having to pay for more programmers.
    • Because it might have better Windows support than PostgreSQL. I'm looking forward to giving it a whirl.
    • >
      Why would someone want to use this instead

      Because Ingres still supports a relational language, QUEL.

  • MYSQL (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:25PM (#9243961)
    With all the quality open-source RDBMS's like Postgres, Firebird and now Ingres why the hell would anybody, ANYBODY want to use a hacked up beast like MYSQL for heavy database work. MYSQL was beautiful when it was used for what it was designed for. At some point, the developers gave in to user demands to start adding in RDBMS functionality, and now its a multiheaded beast. Sad.

    • Re:MYSQL (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hendridm ( 302246 ) * on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @12:50AM (#9244632) Homepage
      This is Slashdot, where PHP, MySQL, and Visual Basic are "toy" applications. PHP is awesome and getting better all the time. Is it the killer language that will devour all others? Hell no, but my clients don't seem to care as long as their sites are running. MySQL is the backend on them all, too. Works great for what they need. Is Visual Basic toxic waste that causes new programmers to forever learn how to code the wrong way? Yes, but it seems to do okay for RAD at my current employer. Yeah, the apps would be cool if they were in C++, but it isn't necessary for nearly all the apps the employees use.

      Use the right tool for the job! Sometimes standards are more important than cutting edge. Would I like to upgrade our web server to something less loathsome than ASP and FrontPage extensions? Hell yes! But transition takes time, especially in a zero-budget bureaucracy...
      • I get a bit fed up with all the PHP/VB bashing as well.

        A LOT of companies use these tools, partly because they are simple and quick.

        I've also used MS Access when it suited. For getting something implemented in a department in a very short deadline as an interim solution to something more scalable and stable.

      • Re:MYSQL (Score:5, Informative)

        by joib ( 70841 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @07:17AM (#9245823)

        MySQL is the backend on them all, too. Works great for what they need.

        Good for you. Frankly, I think that in many cases the features of MySQL would be enough for me too. Now let me explain why I prefer PostgreSQL:

        1. I've used both, and IMHO both are about equally easy to use. So at least for me, the often made claim that MySQL is easier to use is bollocks.

        2. I don't run the DB on Windows, so the fact that MySQL has a native Windows port and PostgreSQL hasn't, doesn't bother me. If you care, the next PostgreSQL release is supposed to include a native Windows version.

        3. The PostgreSQL client libraries are BSD, while the MySQL libraries are GPL. If I make commercial apps, I would have to buy a commercial license from MySQL Ab.

        4. MySQL is often supposed to have superior performance compared to PostgreSQL in the case of a single user doing simple queries. But IMHO this doesn't really matter, since in almost all cases a single user doing simple queries means a simple application, where any low end PC provides enough juice. Where performance matters is a situation with many users doing complicated queries (including writes as well as reads), a situation that PostgreSQL handles much better than MySQL.

        5. Features. The PostgreSQL query language supports a much larger subset of the latest SQL standard (SQL:2003) than MySQL. If I find that I need some specific feature, it is quite probable that it exists in PostgreSQL but not in MySQL. Such as subselects, how can you live without them?
        And no, beta versions of MySQL don't count. Or stored procedures.

        6. ACID properties, something that the PostgreSQL development team takes very seriously. E.g. does MySQL check foreign key constraints, or are they still no-ops?

        In short, I feel that MySQL provides no benefit compared to PostgreSQL at the low end (such as ease of use etc.), and if you need more high-end features you'll run out of steam with MySQL way before PostgreSQL does.

        • Re:MYSQL (Score:3, Interesting)

          by danharan ( 714822 )
          The only reason I started with MySQL instead of PG was because of the windows installer, or more specifically PHPTriad.

          After mucking around in Oracle and PL/SQL for a year and reading about db normalization, going back to PHP was fairly traumatic. There's no way you can build enterprise-scale apps with that toy. No sub-selects or transaction support? Eek!

          I'm eagerly waiting for PG's native windows install, and re-writing all my queries to standard SQL, erasing hundreds of line of code that hacked around M
      • The point is not whether or not you can accomplish something using MySQL. The point is that it takes more effort on your part to do it right. If you were my employee I'd want you to do it right in the shortest amount of time. MySQL forces you to spend more time to do it wrong.

        For example:
        *Before MySQL implemented foreign key constraints you had to manually run queries to ensure that the parent(s) existed (this is still a problem if you do not use InnoDB)
        *Since MySQL lacks more complex constraints you must

  • Plone license (Score:5, Informative)

    by polin8 ( 170866 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:33PM (#9244004) Homepage
    from the Plone Foundation Faq [plone.org]
    Will Plone still be Open Source?

    Absolutely. Plone will be issued under an OSI-approved license. The Foundation is working to build a guarantee of this nature in to the Foundation bylaws and in the contributor agreement."

    Will Plone will also be released under a non-GPL (or non-Open Source) license?

    The current Plone approach states that companies can negotiate a non-GPL license. Thus, the Foundation might pursue a dual-licensing (GPL and non-GPL) scheme -- but, at this time, the Board has not yet created any policies on this. This is an important question for the community, of course, and the Foundation intends to have this conversation in a transparent way. For more information, see Contributor's Agreement for Plone Explained.

    • If I had mod points I would mod this post back up. Clearly this is not Offtopic as it cleared up something that the article clearly got wrong regaurding plone no longer being under the GPL.

      Somone please mod this post back up as informative!

    • Re:Plone license (Score:3, Insightful)

      by drmike0099 ( 625308 )
      Is anyone else a little bit disturbed by this change in licensing? Perhaps it was the CA guy referring to the GPL as "viral" in the article, or perhaps it was that they went out of the way to reassure us that nothing "sinister" was going on. Maybe it's the fact that they are coming up with (yet another) open source license, which typically means they have some hokey rule in there that fits the OSI's definition legally, but not in spirit.

      I could definitely be considered paranoid, but they could have easi
      • I think the biggest problem was that the news came from CA, not from the Plone Foundation. CA jumped the gun.

        The other concern is that according to the article CA plans to release a Plone based product on Monday, but they don't want to release the source. As of now, Plone is GPL only, iirc. It seems that CA may have trouble getting a license they like by this weeken.
        /me shrugs

  • Ingres and Postgres (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:41PM (#9244056)
    I believe that Ingres was the predecessor of Postgres. I believe that both of them came out of Michael Stonebreaker. Ingres was it's own company until CA bought it in the early or mid 1990s. Postgres also became a product (UniSQL? Is that right?)... but in the end that product failed.

    In fact, Ingres was once a major leader, but it kind of lost it's cookies thanks to Sybase, Oracle, and even Digital's RDB. And I don't think too many Ingres users were happy when CA bought it up.

    • Re:Ingres and Postgres (Score:2, Informative)

      by brre ( 596949 )
      Basically correct.

      University INGRES was Stonebraker's RDMBS designed and implemented at UCB. He founded a company Ingres to bring it to market. Ingres developed INGRES for over 10 years into an industrial strength database system, adding query and application development tools, forms tools, reporting tools, DBA tools, programming language integration, application generation, porting to all major UNIX systems as well as VMS and MS-DOS, re-architected it to a client-server model, added support for more sto

    • Re:Ingres and Postgres (Score:4, Interesting)

      by spacefrog ( 313816 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @05:20AM (#9245457)
      I don't think too many Ingres users were happy when CA bought it up.

      No user of a package is happy when CA buys it up. In the early 90's they went on a buying spree, buying up some things that were popular and useful (e.g. Clipper), some things that were mediocre but could have been made into players (e.g. Realizer) and some were absolute crap that they managed to revise to crappier (DBFast, and some weird French-made Windows word processor).

      Some of those products were failures before CA gave them the kiss of death. The ones that weren't, CA managed to destroy all value of on their own.

      CA is the kiss of death. If CA buys one of your software vendors, start shopping for a replacement now.

      Former Clipper developer, but I'm not bitter or anything. Noooo, of course not.
  • It seems like this sort of announcement is becoming a common thing. Heck, even Microsoft did this with their WIX installer.

    Step 1: Dust off the source code for something that hasn't made any money in years.

    Step 2: Slap a GPL on it.

    Step 3: Release it to SourceForge.

    Step 3: Gain the goodwill of the open-source community.

  • Ah, this brings back memories.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hendersj ( 720767 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @10:43PM (#9244069)
    When I was in college back in 89-93, we replaced an aging IBM mainframe with some brand new Sun equipment; one of the classes was a database class, and after the 4361 was retired, we put Ingres on SunOS 4.2 for that class.

    The thing kept falling over when the CS students would try to work with it - in any given time period, if there were more than 2 or 3 students using it, it would just shrivel up and die.

    It was so notorious for this that when we obtained source code to DikuMUD and implemented our own MUD server, we created a character called "Ingres". If you attacked it with any of the vast array of weaponry available, you could never cause any damage. It would never damage back (as it was harmless), but there was one way to kill it:

    LOOK AT INGRES

    Ah, the memories....
  • The first real relational database, to my knowledge, was Ashton Tate's dBase II, which I used on CP/M in the early 80s before DOS even existed.

    If I remember, I think dBase I, which was never on the market, was created by Bell Labs. Bell Labs later sued Ashton Tate for using some code from dBase I, and won. Borland then bought dBase when III Plus was out, IIRC.

    • Re:First real relational database (Score:4, Informative)

      by brank ( 167549 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @11:43PM (#9244330)

      Edgar F. Codd came up with the "relational model" while working at IBM San Jose after becoming dissatisfied with every other DB ever written.

      Codd immediately became mired in internal politics (one of the DBs Codd was dissatisfied with was IBM's own :). But an IBM research group at San Jose created System R anyway,. That was the first relational database in the early 70's. Ingres came almost right after, when some Berkley scientists decided it might be fun to play with the ideas that were slowly filtering out of IBM.

      dBase came out of a JPL (Jeb Long) engineer's work, and the first versions did owe a lot to earlier mainframe DBs. The first relational DB for home computers, maybe, but not the first relational database.

    • "dBase II" was the name of Wayne Ratliff's "Vulcan" after Ashton-Tate bought it (changing their own name in the process, I believe from "Discount Software"). It may have been the first microcomputer relational database, but a bunch of other comments here are saying that Ingres also originated in 1978.

      If you don't restrict yourself to commercial systems, a quick Google search brings up articles on IBM's experimental "System R" as early as 1973.
    • If you're prepared to accept dBase II as a relational database, then I'd submit that IBM's ISAM/VSAM files have been around a good deal longer than that and they're fairly similar in terms of capability. No transaction level support, no ACID compliance, etc.

      In terms of longevity, I've heard that William the Conqueror was tracking his troops using ISAM files when he invaded England in 1066.
      • Did IBM's ISAM/VSAM database permit you to declaratively join tables via keys and enforce unique constraints on groups of colums to create keys? This is what defined a database as relational.

        Transactional concepts are abstracted so that

        • They are not required to relate data.
        • A database that supports ACID transactions does not have to be relational.
        They are completely independent database concepts.
      • Behind one major system for trading financial securities (the largest for derivatives, at least) is a straightforward ISAM-type mechanism. Relational was too slow. The ISAM files certainly qualify for being called a database and the flavour of ISAM they use has ACID as well. However there are no constratints, no referential integrity and no space management. In short, there is a non-relational database without a management system.
      • "In terms of longevity, I've heard that William the Conqueror was tracking his troops using ISAM files when he invaded England in 1066."

        England? That's in Texas, right? ;)

  • The Greatest Upgrade to Ingres... (Score:4, Informative)

    by 10scjed ( 695280 ) on Monday May 24, 2004 @11:30PM (#9244280) Homepage
    Is removing that god-awful CA licensing, anyone who has deployed CA products knows what I mean. That RegisterIT/LicenseIT OLF garbage, even with a "valid" license file it would time out half the time. And forget about changing hardware or a NIC, they bind their license files to your machines MAC address. CA Licensing is worse than Microsoft's activation.
  • Is this the same as the last commercial Ingres product? I wonder if this includes all the tools that Ingres had. Like report generators and application generators. Would be cool I guess if it has all that.

  • License is *NOT* changing (Score:5, Informative)

    by HammerToe ( 111872 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @01:08AM (#9244700) Homepage
    Joel Burton best sums it up on ZopeZen:

    "eweek.com reported on the Plone Foundation and CA's involvement, but their information about Plone moving away from the GPL is not correct. This has not happened. For our FAQs on the foundation, please see http://plone.org/foundation/faq.

    I'm sitting here with Alan, Paul, and Mark Murphy, and we really want to make sure that every knows that this is a real mistake and we're trying to reach eweek to let them know to issue a retraction. We want to make certain that everyone understands that no changes have been made and that a change like this would never happen with discussion with the community as a whole. The Foundation is an exciting change for our community, and we don't want this mistaken information to let people lose site of that."

  • As someone who uses Ingres... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jregel ( 39009 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @03:36AM (#9245186) Homepage
    I work for a company that runs it's entire product base on Ingres II (2.0) and we're in the process of migrating to Advantage Ingres 2.6 (and also building a Linux version). I've also have some experience in MySQL so have a basis for comparison.

    While MySQL is fine for non-critical apps, and is especially easy to use for web applications, Ingres is designed to manage large databases. We have several of the largest local authorities in the UK running Ingres on big Sun boxes (E10K / E15K) with databases in the 10s of GBs. Ingres can handle this fine. There are some things that Oracle can do that Ingres still can't, but the ease of administering an Ingres installation is trivial. I've sat down with Oracle DBAs and they have been astounded at how easy it is to create new databases, take backups etc.

    The biggest weakness with Ingres has always been the lack of users (and hence a limited community). It's everywhere because most CA products that require a DB have Ingres running underneath (such as Brightstor Enterprise backup), but most people don't get to see it. Open Sourcing Ingres is very good for us, and excellent for the OSS community as it gives us a powerful, enterprise-grade DBMS server.

    This is very exciting news, and DBA-gurus would be wise to check this out. W00t.

    • As an Oracle DBA (Score:4, Informative)

      by Moderation abuser ( 184013 ) on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @05:20AM (#9245459)
      I'll second your motion. Almost any RDBMS is simpler to manage than Oracle is. I've used Oracle, Informix, Postgresql, MS SQL server, mysql, etc etc, though not Ingres.

      I honestly don't see the attraction Oracle has to companies. 99% of corporate databases are trivial, they could be implemented on text files or the dreaded spreadsheet and make no use at all of the features Oracle has. It's just that 1% which need Oracle and associated DBAs so why insist on Oracle for everything? It's wildly expensive.

      • Re:As an Oracle DBA (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mangu ( 126918 )
        I agree completely about Oracle being a bitch to manage and vastly overpowered for almost all databases. I have been using Postgres for all new applications I create, and Ingres and Oracle for legacy applications. I believe the reason why so many developers choose Oracle is twofold: first, it's so widely used, many people are familiar with it. Second, nobody ever got fired for choosing Oracle. People feel confident that no matter what database they throw at Oracle, it will be able to handle it.

        As for the c

      • >
        Almost any RDBMS is simpler to manage than Oracle is

        Except that there aren't many left, only the QUEL portion of Ingres and Alphora Dataphor. All the rest are SQL.

        >
        I honestly don't see the attraction Oracle has to companies

        Proprietary lock-in and herd behaviour.

  • Post/Ing/Whatever -gres needs marketing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday May 25, 2004 @07:46AM (#9245990)
    Postgres is one of those products that are cool but don't soar due to a hazy unhip image. People either use MySQL (most know DB) or something like SAP(!!)DB or it's follow-up MaxDB.
    For one I'd say Postgres (or is it PostgreSQL???) could _really_ use a better, grittier name. And the Site needs an optical redo.
    My 2 cents.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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