Computer Associates International plans to open source
the Ingres database next week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco under
its own CA Trusted Open Source Licence (CA-TOSL).
"We think this will change the market dramatically," said Tony
Gaughan, senior vice-president, CA. "We're competitive with
Oracle."
Gaughan said that this iteration of Ingres, dubbed r3, will
outperform Microsoft's SQL Server database, and is more attractive
price-wise because it is open source. Although he could not site
specific technical benchmarks, Gaughan said that when both
databases are running on the same hardware.
Microsoft has not run any tests against Ingres, but Tom Rizzo,
director of product management for SQL Server, questioned CA's
testing methodology, since it was not done within the industry
benchmark TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council)
organisation.
"Ingres is not one of our mainstream competitors," Rizzo said.
He continued that Microsoft sees Ingres competing not with the
higher-end version of SQL Server but instead with Microsoft's MSDE
(Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine), which will become the
forthcoming SQL Server Express, due in conjunction with SQL Server
2005 and slated for delivery in the first half of next year.
SQL Server Express is a free version of the database.
Microsoft has sent SQL Server 2005 into beta 2 last week, adding
support for AMD's Opteron chips, as well as a new management tool
called SQL Server Management Studio which combines existing
management tools and adds support for SQL Server Reporting
Services, Notification Services, XML, and SQL Server 2005 Mobile
Edition.
CA has been working on Ingres r3, for 12 to 18 months. "It's
significant. We've added a lot of new features. Ingres has to be
industrial-strength," he said.
Ingres is also three to five development years ahead of the
open-source MySQL database. But CA has chosen Oracle, rather than
IBM's DB2.
"If you compare Ingres r3 with Oracle 9i, we're very comparable,
but Oracle 10g goes ahead of us. We think we can catch up to 10g.
Our goal is to exceed Oracle - if we just catch up then there's no
point," Gaughan said.
CA has added a clustering option to Ingres that uses Oracle's
technology. CA partnered with JBoss Group to take advantage of the
latter's Hibernate persistence and query service to expose data
objects.
But at least one analyst was sceptical about Ingres' chances of
making a dent in the database world.
"I don't think anyone is going to be interested in another
open-source DBMS," said Bill Claybrook, president of New River
Marketing Research, a consultancy specialising in open-source
technologies. "It is very difficult to make an impact on the
database market."
Other companies have failed in what CA is trying to pull off.
Great Bridge, for example, found that it could not survive selling
support services for $50,000 (£27,500) for PostgreSQL, and
ultimately closed in September 2001.
Furthermore, even if CA does in fact surpass Oracle 10g in terms
of performance, the cost of migrating away from a database such as
SQL Server or Oracle, particularly when considering applications
used with the DBMS, makes the fact that Ingres is open source and
initially free less attractive, and may prohibit customers from
switching to any open-source database.
Claybrook pointed out that the most promising opportunity for
Ingres r3 resides in small and emerging companies.
"The other area we have some potential in is managing structured
and unstructured data," CA's Gaughan said.
CA also plans to harvest the open-source community to add
capabilities that Ingres currently lacks, chief among those native
XML support. But that will require a community of Ingres
developers, which, according to Claybrook, is currently
non-existent.
The initial open-source release of Ingres R3 will run on Linux;
subsequent platforms will follow.
Tom Sullivan writes for Infoworld