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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!!
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.
First release? Ingres has been around for quite a while. We have used ingres as a commercial product for a decade. Not to say it doesn't have bugs though.
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.
you and your "logic" and your "knowledge" of "computers" and "stuff."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
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.
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
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