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IBM Donates Java Database App. to Apache Foundation

Posted by michael on from the have-a-nice-steaming-cup dept.

the_pooh_experience writes "IBM has announced that it will open up Cloudscape by giving it to the Apache Software Foundation. Cloudscape, a small footprint Java database, is primarily used for small scale websites and point-of-sale systems. Its new, opensource name will be 'Derby.' Cloudscape (originally created by Informix, and purchased by IBM in 2001) has been valued by IBM at $85M."

2 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Foot in the door? by rjstanford · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In any case it's cool they donated it. Being a database developer myself, I'm extremely wary of the "you don't need a DBA" claim, but regardless of the hype it looks like an interesting product that will fit in well with the Apache lineup.

    I've never used Cloudscape, but coming from its Informix roots I trust this - to a certain extent, of course. If you never used Informix, it absolutely rocked in terms of stability and ease of maintenance. We had one Informix DBA for every 100 or so installed machines (with many installed instances per machine) for product support at my last company. It never got the press that Oracle did: they made the classic (beta, Xerox, TI, ...) mistake of assuming that just because they were technically superior that people would just flock to them. That, and you don't get the Informix consultants recommending the product like you do with Oracle - mainly because you don't need 'em around. 95% of the standard "Oracle add-on" products and services were either built in or not needed.

    So since this was their most "simple" database, I have some pretty good feelings about it. One thing that would be interesting is that this will open up the code to their SQL optimizer. That's one area where Informix always truly rocked compared to pretty much everyone else outside of a lab situation. I don't know how much of it got into Cloudscape, of course.

    --
    You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
  2. Performance by DuncanE · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not really sure how it compares to mySql or postgres, but I loaded a 50+ million row table with a non index timestamp field to Cloudscape and MSSQL. Both took about 3 seconds to return a query returning a unique row (ie a row updated on a specific date and time) on this field on a 2ghz intel machine with 1GB RAM.

    Firebird SQL was about the same. Next Im going to try HSQL.

    I would be interested in anybody elses experiments?