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CA Advantage Ingres To Be Released As Open Source
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.
1. Create bad design
2. Create bad software
3. Sell zero copies
4. Release as "open source" to get attention
5. No Profit!!
Going open-source is the smart move, no matter what the software may do. Ingres is buggy just like any other first release. Open-source makes it attractive to us nerds, and the wider the user base, the greater the number of users who can manipulate the software, and the faster the bugs disappear.
At least so far as commercial products go, Oracle was the first. 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.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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.
Why would someone want to use this instead of PostgreSQL?
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
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.
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.
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.
m l
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/far/ch6.ht
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).
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.
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.
Unknown host pong.
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....
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
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.
CA has been busy embedding Ingres into almost every single one of their products that requires any sort of data store for quite some time. I read last year (sorry, no links) that Ingres is ironically one of the fastest growing databases around, because every time you install any CA product, you're installing Ingres (whether you know it or not).
Until you try an outer join or something other than trivial SELECTs. At least some of them have different syntax from others, and then there's the matter of working around MySQL's inadequacies. DBI is of very little help.
Infuriate left and right
Let me guess: Lots of useless whining and trolling? Why don't you go outside for a change?
They're getting too damn big for their britches over there if you ask me.
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.
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.
Open Standards Portal
Some background info on QUEL if anyone is interested.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
--10scjed IANAL,AFAIK
What about that this is as diversion from the accounting scandal?
What about the bigger impact of KGEM helping with making Level B1 easier?
KGEM, etc
Sorry, I don't know much about this database. However, if it has replication, could that feature be ported to PostgreSQL? Which needs replication... like now. And yes, I know of the commercial replication add-ons, but an official one would be nice.
The CIA (and the Navy) bought Oracle V1 and V2, not really to use it - who could use it at the time, but as a kind of "federal funding" to help promising technology (kind of VC fund).
I think Oracle3 was rewritten to be in C (and as such, portable) and it was kind of somewhat usable; V4 was usable and I actually deployed it in production!
Stonebreaker also created the Illustra object relational database after leaving academia.
It seemed to have been created with the intention of having the big players buy it out, just to eliminate it as a competitor.
Informix bought them, then IBM bought Informix.
The only Illustra bit that seems to have survived was the "datablade" terminology for sets of structures and functions for specific data types.
Some of the original Illustra datablades were fun to fiddle with, a long time ago...
Much of the actual research (and the SeQueL language itself) was done by IBM. Hell, Codd worked for them.
Also, so the story (told by current and former IBMers I've met) is that Oracle's query optimizer was one of the discarded (open) research ones that IBM passed up for the one that formed the basis for what's DB2. Take that with a grain of salt.
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
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.
I wonder if this has anything to do with their desperate effort to get on the OSS community's good side?
a na gement/story/0,10801,92550,00.html?from=story_pick s
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/m
CA is made up of dozens (hundreds?) of companies they've bought out, whose employees they've laid off and whose products they try and fail to integrate into a cohesive whole. I'm amazed they've stayed in business this long...
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."
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Check it yourself . I wonder why would anybody want to use Ingres, when PostgreSQL is so much better.
"Bush for ex-President 2004"
Bush for President -- of Iraq. He made the mess, let him fix it.
He lied, they died.
Originally, the University (or at least the Ingres Project) tried to sell it. They got into a bunch of trouble with AT&T over it (as UC only had an educational license, not a commercial license).
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.
See my journal, I write things there
Yea he is
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.
Yep i think MS bought it a long time ago and SQLServer 1 was basically all Ingress plus some extras. Im trying to rememeber whether it *was* Ingres, MS did buy in a product it wasn't developed from scratch in house.
Sybase.
Cheers,
Ian
heh yeah that's right. There are so many dead databases its hard to keep up :)
Step 2: Slap a GPL on it.
It's not GPL. It's some other license that nobody seems to have found a link to. Almost for sure, it will some crap license that either does not give, or does not preserve, the freedoms that the GPL gives and preserves.
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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 optimizer was without doubt the best. Superior marketing and rapidly improving technology gave Oracle a huge market advantage by the mid 90's. At the same time Ingres stagnated as the buggy OpenIngres version was rolled out.
CA bought ingres in the mid 90's. After a period of disorganisation while most of the original Californian development team were laid off or quit, CA began to add new features again & the product became a lot more solid.
It is currently used by legacy sites & as a backend for CA's products. If you buy something like Unicentre, you'll get Ingres quietly installed as well.
Technically:
- behind Oracle/DB2, but evolving at higher speed.
- ahead of PostGRES & mysql is still a joke.
- only real advantage over Oracle since the early 90's is it's ease of database administration. It pretty much manages itself, which is why it's niche is now as a backend to other products.
I thought MS SQLServer was origonally SYBASE.
MS forked off at about SYSBASE v6.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Link are a pain in the ass in slashdot because you have to remember the actual HTML tags. Stupid.
A lot of other sites allow you to create it down below the text area (sort of an "html helper" area).
Some of us have people who work for us who do the HTML tags. Some of us haven't done an HTML tag since '96. I realize you were just finishing up the 4th grade at that point, but really, some of us have been around the block a few times.
"but my clients don't seem to care as long as their sites are running. "
Spoken like a kid who doesn't have to clean up after his own mess.
No, seriously, the reason it works for you is because you build trivial sites. Those of us who actually make money at e-commerce can afford to do it the right way, and not pay some lone hacker to build a site, no matter how "good" he thinks he is.
That's not a flame, that's CA's business model.
As a manager at a company, you have to realize that when CA buys a product you depend on, its time to budget to replace that product in the next 12-24 months.
Again, not a flame, just a statement of realism.
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.
Uhm.. I think Sybase would object to on of their flahship products being called "dead database".
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is that like when the Japanese do a bad translation from Spanish into English?
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Interesting debate on this very subject in the Ingres newsgroup a year ago. It prompted a denial that Ingres would ever go open source. Looks like they had another think...
RDB was SQL but it ran only of VMS for a very long time, I don't recall that it ever ran on Ultrix. DEC bundled a runtime license for Ingres (called Ultrix-SQL) with some versions of Ultrix and it was bundled into some of the Ultrix versions of some of the Polycenter products.
From the good book
Actually they purchased the rights to use the Sybase 4.9.2 source code. I don't remember if there was a Sybase 6 but I do know that they jumped several numbers to "System 10".
Uhm.. I think Sybase would object to on of their flahship products being called "dead database".
May I add, ASE 12.5 rocks my world.Let's get that straight. System R was not an invention, but a misdevelopment from Codd's work on the Relational Model. SQL is bad.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
RDB definitely ran on Ultrix later (or maybe by then it was OSF/1). I agree that porting would have been an 'interesting problem' due to an innate awareness of the VMS lock manager. Very nice, but not very portable.
See my journal, I write things there
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.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Keep in mind that Ultrix and OSF/1 (later Digital UNIX) were completely separate UNIX implementations.
OSF/1 was a new UNIX implementation that was released ONLY on Alpha machines (or rather, the Digital version of OSF/1 was only released on Alpha, the IBM and HP versions of OSF/1 were respecively called AIX and HP/UX but I digress).
Ultrix ran on VAXen and on the MIPS chip DECstation/DECserver machines (it also was beta tested but never shipped on PDP-11, I know I was a beta tester).
I still recall that RDB for UNIX was not publically released on Ultrix but I may be wrong, by the time it was starting to hit the streets I wasn't paying attention to databases that didn't run under SAP, including Ingres, Sybase and RDB.
It wasn't, there were DBMSs such as CA IDMS and IBM IMS much before SQL came to light.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Indeed until v7 Oracle only had (or recommended) a rules-based optimiser vs IBM's cost-based one. This was one more proprietary lock-in for Oracle, since Oracle SQL coding was badly distorted to extract the last grain of performance, making it slow in better optimisers.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I don't know about a full release of RDB for Ultrix, but I definitely remember an SPD for RDB/Ultrix-32.
See my journal, I write things there
1. SQL was an IBM development. It was a play on the language name of "Quel".
2. SQL is bad.
3. Codd's relational database work was an IBM project. Codd was an IBM employee.
4. System R was an IBM development. SQL/DS was based on the System R codebase.
5. System R was used in customer's production systems, under VM/CMS, starting in 1977.
6. SQL is the now the defacto relational database language.
Hope that helps!
Hope that helps you understand the big picture
Commercial UNIX predates Mike starting the Ingres project. More to the point, as a University, CAL didn't have a commercial license, just an educational one.
Try using stored procedures instead of inline SQL. Better encapsulation, exception handling, easier to develop (separate database development and query optimization from application construction...) etc.
If there's enough momentum (if the app is any good) you should see a fork that will continue development under the GPL.
= 9J =
So you're saying that crap was released before some other really bad crap that eventually wasn't so bad, but still crap.
Cool. Sounds just like today. Of course, we're up to Crap version 10 or 20 or something like that now.
+++OK ATH
It couldn't be, since SQL ain't relational...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin