It has been nearly nine months since Computer Associates
gave away the source code for its Ingres enterprise database to the
open source community, fuelling speculation that Ingres could
develop into a true open source alternative to commercial
enterprise products such as SQL Server, Oracle and
DB/2.
Although users of the database have gained help from the open
source community in making the system technically current, it will
still not represent significant product development compared with
software from both commercial and open source rivals, according to
Sam Higgins, a senior analyst with Forrester.
“Users will find themselves gaining through the freedom of
community and innovation that has so far been the boon of long-time
Ingres advocates,” he said.
“However, where the divested [Ingres] products are no longer
differentiated, enterprises should be prepared to find alternatives
as these solutions will end their lives in obscurity.”
In August 2005, CA made the source code for the Ingres
relational database available as a free download from its website.
The company said that more than 15,000 copies of Ingres had been
downloaded under the open source licence.
Ingres was initially developed as a Berkeley College research
project during the 1970s. It was commercialised as Illustra during
the 1980s and later incorporated into Informix. The system was
bought by CA in 1994 and offered as an open source product in
2004.
In November 2005, Garnett & Helfrich Capital purchased
Ingres from CA and created a new company called Ingres Corporation,
which will provide support and services for the open source
code.
Ingres has a loyal user base, which applauded the move to open
source given the mammoth difficulty of database migration,
according to IDC research director Rob Hailstone.
“The open source initiative has taken the pressure off people
looking to more elsewhere,” he said.
But users looking for new implementations of open source
databases are more likely to choose MySQL.
“It has a lot more traction,” Hailstone said. “The difference is
that MySQL was designed to be open source, whereas Ingres was
designed to be commercially supported. I am not convinced it is
going to be easy for the open source community to contribute to
enhancements to a system they were not involved with from the
start.”
In the overall database market, users with business-critical
requirements for performance and reliability would always opt for
proprietary systems, he added.