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Open Source Ingres Swings At Oracle, SQL Server
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."
Not SQL-type competition. Remember Cloudscape? Looks like CA is really trying to answer IBM's challenge!
No, but isn't it refreshing that a VP was actually honest about the features of their DB in comparison to what else is out there?
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
If CA "retains control over the products and features", then it doesn't sound like it's open source. It's only open source if people have the right to fork the project and make incompatible changes. And that's an important ability because that is what, ultimately, keeps the original developers on their toes.
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.
The Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL) apparently qualifies as an "open source" license, but it would probably not qualify as a "free software" license. The focus on user's software freedom found in the free software movement is important in interpreting what powers the license grants and what the license claims to regulate.
Section 10.1 tries to control use of the program--if one's rights under the license terminates, the license claims that that user's rights to use the program terminate as well. But the FSF tells us that US copyright law doesn't permit setting conditions on merely running a computer program (outside of a license or encryption manager) and that if this were to become accepted, would extend copyright law in a dangerous way. This was part of the rationale for saying the first and second revisions of the Apple Public Source License were not free software licenses.
Section 11.4 of the CATOSL claims that no licensee will bring a legal action under the license more than once a year. When one does bring a legal action, one is supposed to waive a jury trial and hold the trial in the state of New York. Licensees in other districts may enjoy rights which the state of New York does not recognize or grant, including the right to bring suit more than once a year; rights licensees would want to retain should they need to go to court.
I'm sure a more thorough examination of the CATOSL would reveal more problems for users. I don't recommend getting involved with programs licensed under the CATOSL. This shouldn't pose a practical problem for anyone because there are excellent database programs under more amenable licenses, including PostgreSQL (licensed under the new BSD license) and MySQL (licensed under the GNU GPL). I also don't recommend licensing one's own programs under the CATOSL.
Digital Citizen
Google and you will find: http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres/forum/30/ 671168450779
--AP
MySQL - The best. Somehow I know of no company willing to deploy this at a mission critical level.
Strange, isn't it?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
It'll be hard to compete against Oracle, who is already a player in the linux market.
Yes, in particular since the reason most people use Oracle is the fact that everybody is running it ("you don't get fired for running the same DB software as all the other financial institutions"), not that it is necessarily actually faster or more reliable. It's hard to compete with that.
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.
... wow, right?
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
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...