CA Executive Outlines Open Source Plans For Ingres

Rob Westervelt writes "In this Q&A, a top CA executive outlines CA's plans to take on Oracle, MySQL and others with the newly open sourced Ingres database. The status of CA's Million Dollar Challenge to open source developers is also explained."

Comments

1st post

[rubee]

anything that chips away from oracle is good news.

What's CA?

[mapinguari]

California? Canada? Cellular Automata? Certificate Authority?

Might help to put "Computer Associates" somewhere in the text.

does anyone have a feature list of Ingres vs Other

[xutopia]

I'm wondering how it does compared to other possibilities out there.

Competition

[ldexter]

Hopefully we'll end up with something as stable and functional as Oracle but as free and flexible as MySQL.

Re:Competition

[Meetch]

If you want free, flexible and functional, the best of all worlds with emphasis on free is PostgreSQL. I'm interested in seeing what Ingres has that Postgres doesn't already. My guess is not much.

When I joined the company I'm currently with, I found it hard to believe they were using MySQL instead of it, but it looks like MySQL got the foothold first.

Stick PostgreSQL on a Reiser 4 filesystem with full journalling enabled, and barring hardware problems your database server should be as solid as a rock.

Nothing against Ingres here, since it worked for me at Uni in 1994, but it's hard to go past the best of the open source when you're already familiar with it.

out of the frying pan into the fire?

[LeninZhiv]

Ingres is going to have its work cut out for it building momentum in its developer community; open source DB coders are already divided up between MySQL, Postgres, Firebird, Cloudscape, plus some others like Berkeley and HSQL.

On the commercial side, Sybase has been going after Linux deployments in a big way with a 'lots of advertising and free beer' approach. DB2 and Oracle are hardly neglecting Linux as a platform either...

I can see the wisdom of open sourcing Ingres--in such a heavily competitive area as databases, any edge you can get is a good one. But it's getting to where it's just as competitive recruiting open source developers as it is finding customers, so that's going to be tough for them. At least Cloudscape fills a niche that others don't by being pure Java; Ingres has to try to lure community interest away from Firebird and Postgres--not easy.

That said I do think that MySQL holds more community mindshare than it merits (weighed either by features or by freedom), so Gaughan is definately on the right track going after them foremost in this interview.

Re:out of the frying pan into the fire?

[mnmn]

I dont thing Ingres has to take attention away from Postgres and Firebird, maybe just firebird.

I've been looking for an RDBMS for running on OpenBSD and Postgresql doesnt quite cut it with the lack of certain features. Firebird, Ingres are on one level, postgres is on another, mysql and sqlite another. There is still a shortage of opensource RDBMS-scale databases out there. The opensourceness will take these DBs to OpenBSD, FreeBSD and the likes.

Mysql does have lots of attention, but just because it fits nicely on apache webservers, and thats a big market. For a newbie like me, postgres was a bit of a struggle initially (7.3) and I had to worry about tuning it and maintaining it. Mysql's default configs fits the largest market, webservers, so it gets that market regardless of merits.

Now that sqlite is packaged with PHP, I expect to see it grow, being simpler than mysql, it should in theory cut into that market. Postgresql holds a niche, the spot between baby databases like mysql/sqlite and RDBMSes, and I dont think it has a competitor. If Ingres is ported around BSD, it will take a huge lead over the other commercial linux ports.

Re:out of the frying pan into the fire?

[Phouk]

I've been looking for an RDBMS for running on OpenBSD and Postgresql doesnt quite cut it with the lack of certain features.

Come on, don't tease us ;) - which ones?

Postgresql holds a niche, the spot between baby databases like mysql/sqlite and RDBMSes

One of the open-source, "real" RDBMSes that has been missing in the discussion so far, is MaxDB, former SAP DB. We've got it in production in a "serious" app (real money, heavy load), and so far it really does scale well with bigger hardware (additional processors, RAM, disks).

One disadvantage with MaxDB is that it is lacking in mindshare compared to some others, although that is slowly improving - Google already finds three times more hits for MaxDB than SAP DB. Until now, there are no good books about it.

Another disadvantage is its stored procedure language - rather primitive and heavily underdocumented. PostgreSQL, for example, shines in that respect.

Ingres features

[downward dog]

Ingres has a discussion of that at http://www3.ca.com/Files/IndustryAnalystReports/bb _ingres.pdf.

Surprisingly balanced (though a little slanted). Reads like a realistic strategy document: "How can we compete with MySQL? Oracle? SQL Server?"

Re:Ingres features

[mnmn]

I have a similar question. I'd like to see the features list, or how advanced each database system is from sqlite to oracle.

I first thought mysql was small, until someone told me its below the level of oracle, sql2000 and sybase. Next I installed postgresql, seemed pretty advanced and learned its features. Then I found out its still one level below the mission critical databasen.

How can we compare these databases beside pure opinion and crawling the PDFs and wondering which features are more important than others? How do we not choose mysql over oracle for running a bank branch?

There was just a posting on the PostgreSQL...

[tcopeland]

...advocacy list about Oxford switching from Ingres-based apps to PostgreSQL - right here.

UTILITY PLUG: Here's an open source PostgreSQL query analyzer

Smart to not even mention PostgreSQL.

[jlrobins_uncc]

He didn't even mention PostgreSQL. Smart, really, since PG is the 'true' opensource version of this codebase.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres the wikipedia for the gory details.

Woo-Hoo!!!

[swamp boy]

and both users rejoiced.

MySQL not "truely" open source?

[mikefe]

"Gaughan: If you look at MySQL's license it is commonly known as a duel license. It is essentially released as GPL, which is a true open source license, but GPL restricts you from embedding MySQL technology into your product. Your product also has to be open sourced. The way MySQL has gotten around that is by giving out a commercial license, which is the same as any other commercial license. You would have to pay a license fee to MySQL. So it's not truly open sourced. You never pay a license for Ingres r3."

They are equating the need for a license for commercial extensions to MySQL to not being "really" open source.

If they wanted to allow commercial use, they could have chosen the LGPL with a IP indemnification clause.

Dual (not "Duel") licensing is one of the accepted ways to make money from Open Source. The fact that the OSS license is GPL is icing on the cake.

Errrr...

[Ayanami Rei]

Never mind that Ingres and Postgres have never shared a bit of code (says so in the Postgres wiki article).

Interesting admission

[darnok]

> There has been a perception that once CA purchases
> a product, they run it into the ground. Has that
> perception been difficult to overcome with Ingres?

> Gaughan: Personally my knowledge of CA when I
> joined the company was pretty much along the lines
> of what you outlined.

Gaughan then goes on to explain that things have now changed, yada, yada...

My impression of CA is certainly along the interviewer's lines; they acquire stuff and milk it to death, not upgrading it, not supplying important patches and presumably living off the support revenue.

In fact, as I write this, there's a CA technical support guy (yes, they do exist!) onsite two desks over working with one of this company's techos. CA's challenge: convince us that Harvest, a CA source management product that seems locked in the past feature-wise but is costing us $$$ for support and maintenance, has any serious compelling features over and above Subversion.

I, and I suspect many others, will find it tough to believe that CA have suddenly "seen the light" and will start actually developing, supporting and enhancing the assets they have as opposed to selling something and providing excuses from that point on.

On the Ingres topic, I've downloaded it but probably won't look at it seriously unless/until I'm convinced it offers something over Postgres (free, usually good enough) and MySQL (free, well supported, fast and good for read-only apps) on the one hand and SQL Server/Oracle/DB2 (expensive, very powerful and scalable) on the other. Last time I used Ingres was 2 years ago, but my impression then was that it hadn't progressed significantly in the preceding 10 years (i.e. it was a typical CA product).