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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
it's green.
Ingres is a backronym for "Interactive Graphics REtrieval System" (the task from which Stonebraker got his original funding). It was named after French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
it's green.
Speaking as the Systems manager of an organisation that uses Ingres, I can quite happily state that many people use Ingres and love it.
Specifically those organisations that don't need all the bundleware supplied with products like Oracle or SQL server, and can't afford a fulltime DBA onsite.
Ingres performs extremely well as a zero maintenance embedded full-function SQL database, and many of those traits carry over into more general purpose uses.
If you're looking for a good, strong, reliable, low overhead SQL database server for a SME deployment, you would be well advised to look closely at Ingres.
No matter what happens with the Open Source fork of Ingres, the money spent on support with Computer Associates for those rare occasions where you need expert assistance is money well spent. Their staff are professional, literate, punctual, and very client focussed - and this is the manufacturer.
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
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."
so you don't have to remember how to execute SQL on a MySQL database, Postgresql, Oracle, etc., like in PHP -- because in languages like PHP they all use different functions.
Um, do you have something against the Pear DB package and putting "require_once 'DB.php';" in your PHP code?
-- Alastair
Regarding native Windows PostgreSQL, it seems like it's going to be out 'soon' pretty much as long as I can remember. I'm sure it'll happen sometime, but I'm not holding my breath. Even when it does happen, it'll be very new to the platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.