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Computer Associates Sells Ingres DB Tech
Christopher B. Brown writes to tell us Network World is reporting that Computer Associates is selling their Ingres database technology to a private equity firm called Garnett & Helfrich Capital. From the article: "CA released Ingres last year as an open source project, reviving interest in the dormant software. Still, databases have never been a core part of CA's portfolio. CA CEO John Swainson cast the Ingres sale as part of CA's larger effort to streamline the vast collection of applications it amassed through a decade of heavy acquisitions in the 1990s. Ingres came to CA through its 1994 buyout of ASK/Ingres"
First, it's considered interesting. It gradually reduces in attention given to it, until... They release the source code! Revel ye cupids, for the code hath been releas-ed! Next day, no one's heard of it again...
That these acquisitions of modular lightweight technologies appear to be part of a larger dynamic approach to enterprise-class offerings. I can't imagine it stops with an RDBMS and network clients -- I wonder if there are any underappreciated server hardware platforms that they've got their eyes on.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Is this just an attempt to make a name in the OS community? Good luck, using your 10 year old database technology...We've got much better tools available to us open source than 'ingres'.
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
I don't get it. Since PostgreSQl is the successor to Ingres and is properly funded by DARPA - why would anyone bother with the older version? It feels like Linus making a big whoopdedoo about a release of kernel version 1.0 under a BSD license...
Oh well, what the hell...
Coincidence that this happens the day MS finally releases their long delayed SQL Server 2005. Maybe they know something about the database market that has escaped the rest of us so far.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It might have been a good idea in the bad old days but today when we already have a stable, production ready, rock solid, ACID-compliant open-source relational database management system of choice, Ingres will never truly succeed in "reviving interest in the dormant software". It's the same mistake that the record industry has made in the early nineties all over again. They missed the train. Sad but true.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Is there much, if anything, to gain by purchasing Ingres, when Postgresql is free under a non-restrictive license?
Compatibility.
Many large corporations have massive amounts of data stored in system backed by Ingres databases. This is often very important data, and cannot be corrupted.
While a system like PostgreSQL is often more than capable, in a technical sense, it may not offer the 100% compatibility that is needed by serious users. Thus it is often not an option.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
What ever happened to that chick?
Er, lady?
Slightly tangential observation but a few months ago when there was talk about a Sun DB there were some Sun bloggers talking about acquiring Ingres. Then recently there was the story about Sun looking at PostgreSQL. This anouncement from CA makes it seem like they were probably shopping it around to people around the time Sun was talking about a Sun DB and they might have been considering it since Sun didn't buy it makes it seem that we can expect them to really get behind pgsql.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
PostgreSQL (note the play on words, "post" gres comes after "in" gres) descends from the follow-up project which extended relational concepts into an early "object-relational" system. Stonebreaker lays out his goals for the Postgres project in this 1986 paper.
So, Ingres is based on an older design that PostgreSQL. It has also spent 20 years in the corporate world being changed, upgraded, and improved, so evaluating it based on its lineage is like evaluating Oracle 10g based on your knowledge of Oracle 1.0. Interesting historical note: one of Oracle's first substantial competitors (and an early market leader) was a company called "Relational Technologies" that sold a cutting edge relational database named... Ingres.
If you want something that'll do a bit more, but retain a lot of the speed and also keep the footprint down, MySQL is probably the best bet. It has a lot of the functionality of the really large databases - perhaps rather more than is good for a lean, mean database machine - but still gives good balance between function and performance.
PostgreSQL is much more powerful than MySQL, but at the cost of being bigger and generally not as nimble. If you're dealing with mid-sized Enterprise-level databases, I frankly wouldn't care about per-transaction performance as much as I'd care about maintaining good performance for respectable databases for a few hundred simultaneous users. MySQL would be hammered long before PostgreSQL for this kind of work. For GIS stuff, where you've some fairly tricky topographical information to manipulate, you'll notice that PostgreSQL has a far bigger following.
This leaves Ingres, which has a reputation for being good for Big Corporate Data Warehousing. Data warehousing is a very different problem from regular relational database handling. The problem-space is typically orders of magnitude greater, the database generally isn't going to be normalized and the mappings are generally altered to be less I/O-bound - which usually means more work for the CPU.
The problem-spaces solved by these databases are all very very different. I would love to see a database that had pluggable components such that different components were optimized for different types of workload and that different functions could be loaded/unloaded as needed, so your footprint was always the lowest for what you were doing, not what the database was capable of.
The fact is, no such database is in wide use - assuming it exists at all.
And we're only talking about the SQL Relational model. The "pure" relational model (as discussed on Slashdot many times) is different again, as are the Object-Relational and the Object-Oriented models. Absolutely none of these could be used with Xanadu's ZigZag data structures (the relationships are essentially permutations and order-independent, whereas formal databases use relationships that are either one-way or follow a specific ordering). They generally don't distribute well, either, as data is bulkier than code, forcing you to load-balance rather than distribute logically.
(That last part can be solved for some cases - it is fairly common to have a mix of tightly-coupled and loosely-coupled data, so it is possible to split the problem-space in a way that keeps communications down and takes advantage of a parallel architecture. It just isn't easy.)
Ingres is important as a database, because PostgreSQL can't (yet) cut it in the Really Big Database World. As good as PostgreSQL is, I would not want to replace extremely large-scale Informix or DB/2 databases with it. Maybe someday, but not today. Ingres - I'd give it a maybe. It does have the reputation of being able to handle it.
The multitude of engines out there are also important, because there are many, many different problem-spaces out there and NONE of them - not one - is good at even a few, let alone many, and certainly not all. And there are many problem-spaces for which there are no databases at all. At least, none worth mentioning.
This is a fixable problem, but not until someone goes out there and fixes it. That isn't happening. So, until then, I'll use RRD, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, Sleepycat DB4, ZopeDB, OpenLDAP, CUPS*, Shadow*, Postfix*, Reiser4*,
*These all have databases in them. The password file, the print spooler, all the fancy file-access features of Reiser4... And because they're all working in subtly different ways, you WILL have a database engine for each, until or unless someone produces a system that can do all of these as well as each of the specialized solutions.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
(No, this company isn't likely to hold onto it. This looks like the sort of deal where they buy something that might be worth a lot more next week or next year, so they can sell it and make money. Simple speculation.)
Note that this theory ONLY holds up if the price was sufficiently low that if Open Source does have a boom, the investors will be able to make significantly more profit on it than they would have done speculating on, say, stocks or currency. So if it's a land-grab, they're expecting the value of Open Source software to at least double or triple in the next few years. Otherwise, the investment wouldn't be worth it.
(The value of Ingres is important in this - if it cost them $10, then a 100% profit margin won't be hard to achieve. The more they actually paid - never mind anything officially said - the more it will take to make the profit margins they'd have to be looking at.)
There is one other possibility, but it's a remote one. Instead of a boom, they're expecting a crash - particularly in the database market. They'll have IT guys and the Open Source mantra of being able to look at the code can be persuasive. They may be convinced that the database market is so glutted and so unsure of direction that it will have to collapse. If it does so, then the only support they'll have is whatever they give themselves anyway.
In this scenario, they're playing the role of survivalists - acquiring the technology they'll need to survive, expecting things to get nasty for everyone else (ie: everyone still on their feet playing the role of SCO). In this scenario, the only sure defence is to have something with no prior technology in it - and Ingres would meet that. This does seem unlikely, but I wouldn't rule it out without a lot more information.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Grandpa, is that you? Didn't I tell you to quit trolling Slashdot?
If they are short on money ill buy cosmoplayer off them
back in the day we didnt have no old school
you pounced on your opportunity. you made it, you're +5. but you still lost karma from the event.
lol, my good friend. lol.
I can tell you, I've used both Ingres and many other database (including MS-SQL, MySQL, DB2, etc. etc.).
Despite it being considered "old" it, Ingres is a fast and stable database - certain comparable and up to the performance levels and features of many current databases, MS-SQL and MySQL included.
And several cite how much better MySQL is an open source database - to which I'd say:
- read the Ingres and MySQL licenses and tell me which is more open source, and less restrictive? To my eye (and IANAL) the Ingres one poses fewer constraints on use of Ingres as an open source product within commercial products
- ask one of the many big Sun sites who still run very large, very stable applications on Ingres whether they'd like to swap for MySQL?
I have no axe to grind here, but Ingres is a decent database and a proper open source contribution. Just because it has CA's name associated with it, doesn't make it bad
Openroad being the OO Programming language that seems heavily intertwined with Ingres. Used by at least one mid-range market ERP system (Adage) http://www.infor.com/ in the process chemical industry. I was always under the impression that Ingres/Open road (especially since OR 4) were one in the same.
Ingres was totally rewritten in the late 80's and early 90's. Not "improved", rewritten completely. There is essentially no similarity left between the Ingres and PostgreSQL code lines, as anyone who could be bothered to look would tell you. Nor is there any similarity worth mentioning between Ingres today and the Ingres of the early research projects, or indeed the Ingres that RTI sold.
-dB, RTI/Ingres/Ask '84-'94.
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
But then inspection of the code shows its quality to be low
Code quality low?? Are you kidding?
Ingres was right up there with Oracle (and Informix and Sybase) ten years ago. The company who owned it, ASK group, went bust and CA pick up Ingres. As was usual when CA picked up a product, all the Ingres customers sought alternatives - usually Oracle or Informix.
Ingres has fallen this low due to soley to CAs Management(mismanagement?) of the product. Don't know what the current licence is like, but the other open source DBMS's could benefit from the Ingres codebase.
(Of course, an insanely great product doesn't necessarily mean a good quality codebase,but given what it was/is, the code had to be high quality otherwise ASK and CA wouldn't have been able to maintain it)
Does anyone remember the name of the DB software that BBN (Bolt Beranek Newman) produced? An old friend of mine was one of the last people in the world that used it.
Fancy coming back to Ingres Dave? A lot of your high ranking Oracle co-workers have... ;-p
:-)
We'd make you feel most comfortable!
I happened to use Ingres in my first job in 1987 at Citibank. I remember a few "nice" things about the package:
1) We were running on VAX4000 machines that had those multi-platter disk packs the size of a cake carrier that went in a reader the size of a dishwasher. By keeping the system tables on fixed disk and data tables on the removable, we could "swap" databases just by swapping the packs.
2) We used QUEL, relational calculus. Much more powerful and simpler than SQL. I've forgotten most of the details, but I do remember being able to put sums and max calls in the select without having to jump through group by and having by and subquery hoops to do it.
My next job used SQL and I remember struggling for quite a while, getting the hang of relational algebra.
Marketing muscle beats techical innovation again. Sigh.