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

What's CA?

[mapinguari]

California? Canada? Cellular Automata? Certificate Authority?

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

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?"