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Open Source Ingres Swings At Oracle, SQL Server

Posted by timothy on from the you-mean-there-are-free-databases dept.

Rob Westervelt writes "Computer Associates is making its open sourced Ingres DBMS widely available today on Windows and Linux, pitching its mature features and 64-bit support at Oracle and SQL Server customers."

4 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. The competition begins! by VernonNemitz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not SQL-type competition. Remember Cloudscape? Looks like CA is really trying to answer IBM's challenge!

  2. Performance? by weapon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder what sort of performance Ingres has compared to mySQL (lets hope its better), microsoft SQL server and oracle? I know that mySQL is not all that good performance wize, and performace is a important thing with dbms's so for Ingres to be sucessful, i hope they have better peformance than mySQL (no offence ment towards mySQL)

    Weapon

  3. Anyone know how flexible the license is? by jbwiv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is it more BSD-like, or more GPL-like? Can commercial companies use it without paying CA for commercial licenses?

    The PostgreSQL license is what keeps drawing me back to it (aside from being a frickin' awesome database)...I can use it as much as I want without paying exorbitant fees. My company does, however, donate back to the community as much as possible.

  4. Oracle, PostgreSQL or SQL Server by Meetch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ok, first, I'm no Microsoft fan, but if you are a Microsoft shop, and you want commercial support, there's little choice but to use SQL Server. It's a logical choice given the circumstances.

    Second, I've seen a bit of Oracle, and watched our DBAs tearing hair out over mismatches in certifications (we are forced to use RH AS2.1 for their iLearning product where I work, where everything else happily runs on EL3). However, if you're not trying to make a whole bunch of suites of Oracle software work together then it all looks ok. I must agree that they definitely have done databases right. It's hard to go past RAC for ensuring reliability!

    My previous job, I was (network|system|database|web) administrator, and (web|software) (developer|troubleshooter) in the early days, until we were able to expand the IT base a bit. That introduced me to PostgreSQL. I will always remember those days fondly. After a few years away I'm certainly very rusty, but there's nothing to stop me printing up the manuals and getting back on the rails if I ever get the time.

    With our implementation of PostgreSQL we had almost no downtime that wasn't caused by the boss, and experienced one whole inconsistency issue. That issue was patched within 48 hours of being reported. And our hideously inefficient queries just kept chugging along when I felt sure the lack of grunt would cause SOMETHING to snap... IMHO MySQL is still eating its dust in features and reliability. Stick it on reiser4 filesystems, then I reckon virtually all risk becomes genuine hardware failure.

    But hang on... it's not just open source. You can buy a license if you want commercial support! You can even run it on Windows! Not that I would, but ... wow, right?

    The only thing I can say for CA is I hope they maintain the back end better than they create their front ends. The company I work for had CA Unicenter, and since the license expired we switched to an Oracle application and haven't regretted it. It's good to keep the current vendors on their toes, but somehow I doubt they'll grab a good market share. We will see...