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"

Comments

Ah, the tale of many an application...

[penguin_asylum]

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...

Re:Ah, the tale of many an application...

[Doc Ruby]

Could it be that the app was only interesting because of ignorance, both of the quality of the code and of the business value of the app? First the biz value is revealed to be less, which is what causes the release of the source code. Interest declines in the biz value, but possibly rises on the value of the code itself. But then inspection of the code shows its quality to be low, and nothing stops the decline of interest. The secrecy that propped up the app value before is gone, and its true, low value is now clear. It makes more sense when the cause and effect are considered in the proper order.

Why bother?

[HermanAB]

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...

Re:PostgreSQL Lineage

[Wugger]

The lineage of PostgreSQL and Ingres is pretty clear. They are descendents of separate research projects of Prof. Michael Stonebreaker at UC Berkeley. Ingres descends from the an earlier project, which was a proving ground for pure relational technology.

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.