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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.
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."
You have no tools available in the Open Source market that compare with Ingres. If you think otherwise you are deluding yourself.
Ingres is an RDBMS used by large organisations and small, and has a very good technical support system behind it with actual people you can talk to - some even local.
Try that with MySQL, Postgres, etc - the only way you can get equivalent support for them is if you live in the same city as the developers. Computer Associates have offices with support people around the world.
Because Ingres has many paying customers in fortune 500 companies, who have mission critical software running on Ingres and those people are willing to pay more for better support. Postgres is just a branch of Ingres from the early 80s, at this point the two systems have almost nothing in common.
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.
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)
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims? Are all CA employees supposedly wizards with Ingres that can solve any problem at a moment's notice?
Many companies around the world provide very high quality support for PostgreSQL. To say that support for Ingres is better you're going to need to provide some evidence.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
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