Users of the Ingres enterprise relational database
heaped praise on Computer Associates International's plan to
release the code for the database to the open-source
community.
A group of longtime Ingres customers meeting at CA World 2004
said the plan to bring Ingres to open-source within 90 days would
bring a higher profile to a mature relational database that is
not as well known in the US as databases from Oracle and
Sybase.
"I'm tired of being treated like an ugly stepsister and a
second-class citizen because I use Ingres," said Tyler McGraw, a
database administrator at paper making firm Bowater, who has worked
with Ingres for 15 years. "Ingres is a good product, and I dig CA's
effort. Now I don't have to apologise for my database."
Erica Harzewski, a database administrator at medical device
maker Guidant, said CA's announcement would make it easier to
defend Ingres to her bosses, who want to move systems to Oracle
databases.
"Oracle is much more expensive and complex than Ingres, and now
we can make a case for Ingres back home," said Harzewski, who has
used Ingres for 13 years. "CA wouldn't put Ingres out for
[open-source] if it was a piece of crap."
McGraw and Harzewski joined about 20 other longtime Ingres users
at a meeting of the North American Ingres User Association, and all
the users supported CA's open-source play. The user group is
seeking members as it tries to get reorganised after two years of
inactivity, said NAIUA president Carmen Huff, lead database
administrator at Alliance Data Systems in Dallas.
"Going open-source is a great idea," Huff said, noting that
Ingres, while not widely known in the US, has been well received in
Australia and parts of Europe.
CA counts between 25,000 and 50,000 Ingres users globally
but would not divulge product revenues, said Sam Greenblatt, a CA
senior vice president. Ingres is sold by CA as a database under the
name Advantage Ingres and is also embedded in other CA
products.
Bringing it to the open-source community will expose it
immediately to about 100,000 developers associated with JBoss, Zope
and the Plone Foundation, a non-profit community of Plone
developers.
Greenblatt predicted that the open-source move could make Ingres
the leading such database in the US.
"Going to open-source with Ingres could be an important
competitive edge for CA, especially compared with IBM and HP,"
added Mark Ehr, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates.
"CA is trying to reshape its image as a kinder, gentler CA. This
is a good way to get customer mind share, and why not do it with a
product not doing all that well?"
Char Sharp, an IT manager at a Wells Fargo Bank data management
facility, said CA's move is "very exciting", since it looked as
though CA had bought Ingres in 1994 and "just put it on the
shelf".
Dan Kingston, a database administrator at American Digital
Systems, said he and his colleagues have used Ingres for many years
but had worried about CA's commitment to it. "It's an excellent
move, but CA has to be careful how they move it to open-source," he
said.
Several users wondered if the quality of the product could be
compromised, with security vulnerabilities and other bugs
introduced after Ingres goes open source.
Greenblatt said CA will protect the integrity of the software by
releasing it through its CA Trusted Open Source License, a
derivative of the common public licence. With that approach,
customers can download Ingres for free, but they would pay for
service, maintenance and indemnification. Indemnification will
provide a certificate to a user that describes who developed the
code.
Pricing has not been set for any of the added fees.
Despite the users' enthusiasm, Mark Costello, vice president of
Database Management Technology, questioned what new features the
open-source community would add to Ingres, since it is already more
mature than the open-source database MySQL. DMT makes DBAnalyzer,
an Ingres performance management system.
Greenblatt said innovations are hard to predict. "Questioning
what could be added to Ingres is like saying Linux is mature and
what could be added to it?"
Matt Hamblen writes for Computerworld