By Robert Westervelt, News Writer 19 Aug 2004 | SearchDatabase.com
Tyler McGraw, a database administrator at Bowater Inc., a paper maker in Greeneville, S.C., is finished making excuses for being an Ingres DBA.
McGraw, who is also works sometimes as an Oracle DBA, said he has often had trouble keeping up in conversations with other IT professionals at industry trade shows and conventions. Now, though, Computer Associates International Inc.'s decision to turn Ingres over to the open source community, and compete directly with MySQL has changed all that.
McGraw, who has maintained Ingres DBMS at Bowater for 15 years, said his company's global paper operations depend on the reliable product.
"Mainly there's been a perception that it has less features, or is less robust -- and that's simply not true," McGraw said. "Our Ingres database is how we ship paper all over the world. And if it were to fail, we wouldn't be able to keep our operations running."
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Ingres was originally developed as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, during the mid-'70s. It became a commercial DBMS in the mid-'80s, with features and reliability comparable to Oracle, said Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.
"Ingres is known for its reliability and strong relational database features but still remains behind the top commercial DBMS players," Yuhanna said. "We've heard very good comments about Igres in terms of performance scalability and feature sets, and it's definitely going to be an important open source database, competing for a strong deployment adoption rate."
CA is releasing the Ingres code under its CA Trusted Open Source License. Under the license, CA retains ownership of the code and could take the code back in the future.
Ingres' maturity gives it an advantage over MySQL and other open source DBMSes, Yuhanna said. Unicode data support, table partitioning, parallel query, online table reorganization, triggers, bi-directional replication, automatic space management and program language precompilers are key features in Ingres that are not commonly found in other open source databases, Yuhanna said.
The DBMS also has XML support, scalable clusters and Microsoft.NET integration, Yuhanna said. New administration tools and added support from third-party vendors should improve Ingres' deployment rate, Yuhanna said.
Ingres' problem was that it was owned by companies in the '80s that couldn't penetrate the market dominance of Oracle, said Dwight Coles, an application developer at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Coles served as a DBA maintaining Ingres in the '80s and was a member of the New Mexico Ingres Users Group, before it disbanded in '97, because of a lack of interest.
"At one point it was second in market share behind Oracle and we were proud of its prominence," Coles said. "It was always simpler and was almost always competitive in performance, and at one point we felt it was technologically superior to Oracle."
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Ingres open source database on the rise
.NET integration, Yuhanna said. New administration tools and added support from third-party vendors should improve Ingres' deployment rate, Yuhanna said.
By Robert Westervelt, News Writer
19 Aug 2004 | SearchDatabase.com
Tyler McGraw, a database administrator at Bowater Inc., a paper maker in Greeneville, S.C., is finished making excuses for being an Ingres DBA.
McGraw, who is also works sometimes as an Oracle DBA, said he has often had trouble keeping up in conversations with other IT professionals at industry trade shows and conventions. Now, though, Computer Associates International Inc.'s decision to turn Ingres over to the open source community, and compete directly with MySQL has changed all that.
McGraw, who has maintained Ingres DBMS at Bowater for 15 years, said his company's global paper operations depend on the reliable product.
"Mainly there's been a perception that it has less features, or is less robust -- and that's simply not true," McGraw said. "Our Ingres database is how we ship paper all over the world. And if it were to fail, we wouldn't be able to keep our operations running."
For more information
Read our open source case studies
Visit our open source center
Ingres was originally developed as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, during the mid-'70s. It became a commercial DBMS in the mid-'80s, with features and reliability comparable to Oracle, said Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.
"Ingres is known for its reliability and strong relational database features but still remains behind the top commercial DBMS players," Yuhanna said. "We've heard very good comments about Igres in terms of performance scalability and feature sets, and it's definitely going to be an important open source database, competing for a strong deployment adoption rate."
CA is releasing the Ingres code under its CA Trusted Open Source License. Under the license, CA retains ownership of the code and could take the code back in the future.
Ingres' maturity gives it an advantage over MySQL and other open source DBMSes, Yuhanna said. Unicode data support, table partitioning, parallel query, online table reorganization, triggers, bi-directional replication, automatic space management and program language precompilers are key features in Ingres that are not commonly found in other open source databases, Yuhanna said.
The DBMS also has XML support, scalable clusters and Microsoft
Ingres' problem was that it was owned by companies in the '80s that couldn't penetrate the market dominance of Oracle, said Dwight Coles, an application developer at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Coles served as a DBA maintaining Ingres in the '80s and was a member of the New Mexico Ingres Users Group, before it disbanded in '97, because of a lack of interest.
"At one point it was second in market share behind Oracle and we were proud of its prominence," Coles said. "It was always simpler and was almost always competitive in performance, and at one point we felt it was technologically superior to Oracle."