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Databases Programming Operating Systems Software Windows IT Linux

Open Source Ingres Swings At Oracle, SQL Server 39

Posted by timothy from the you-mean-there-are-free-databases dept.
Rob Westervelt writes "Computer Associates is making its open sourced Ingres DBMS widely available today on Windows and Linux, pitching its mature features and 64-bit support at Oracle and SQL Server customers."
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Open Source Ingres Swings At Oracle, SQL Server More

Open Source Ingres Swings At Oracle, SQL Server

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  • The competition begins! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by VernonNemitz ( 581327 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:15PM (#10695666) Journal
    Not SQL-type competition. Remember Cloudscape? Looks like CA is really trying to answer IBM's challenge!
    • The challenge is open only to individuals who on the date of their submission of an entry are Open Source Community Members, of legal age, and are legal residents of, and are physically located within the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, Canada (except Quebec Province), Mexico, United Kingdom, India, China, Australia and New Zealand. Full details of The Challenge eligibility and the official rules are available at http://ca.com/ingres/challenge.

      Why not good old europe?
      And what the heck is wro

  • Uh (Score:1)

    by PickyH3D ( 680158 )
    The poster did not mention the openness of the license AND there were no obvious references to success stories for this database to reasonably compete with Oracle OR SQL Server.
    "Oracle's technology is still far superior, and they still dominate this industry and have taken clustering to larger level where you can scale multiple nodes," Yuhanna said.
    It does not put much faith in me when the VP of Ingres development says that about their own product.

    • Re:Uh (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AntsInMyPants ( 819105 )
      No, but isn't it refreshing that a VP was actually honest about the features of their DB in comparison to what else is out there?

    • Re:Uh (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )
      Sure, so they're throwing in the towel on this one.

      Rather than be contemptuous of this, let me point out this is an honorable way to do it, providing their customers with avenues for obtaining support and features that they may need, for a product they may have made a significant commitment to.

    • Re:Uh (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You obviously skimmed through it to pull out that quote, but did you actually RTFA? From the paragraph preceding your excerpt:

      "...said Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.

      So, it was not a VP of Ingres development talking about their own product.

  • Performance? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by weapon ( 783054 )
    I wonder what sort of performance Ingres has compared to mySQL (lets hope its better), microsoft SQL server and oracle? I know that mySQL is not all that good performance wize, and performace is a important thing with dbms's so for Ingres to be sucessful, i hope they have better peformance than mySQL (no offence ment towards mySQL)

    Weapon

    • Re:Performance? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Red Pointy Tail ( 127601 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:39PM (#10695888)

      I think it is more prudent to ask how this compares to PostgreSQL and Firebird, both in terms of features and performance. mySQL runs blazing fast because it doesn't have all the bells-and-whistles, which are of course sometimes necessary for enterprise database development.
  • looks solid, but this may not be the best move to take market share away from Oracle and SQL Server. Major competition is already presented with postgres and mysql. Splitting up whatever open-source rdbms presence in the corporate world today between these 3 makes each look less widely adopted.

    that's my 10 cents.
    • Oracle - most overly complicated installation. I don't believe so many versions have come out, and the installation is still so chunky with so many pieces.

      SQL server - IMHO this thing does NOT scale well. I don't know what others experienced.

      MySQL - The best. Somehow I know of no company willing to deploy this at a mission critical level.

      • MySQL - The best. Somehow I know of no company willing to deploy this at a mission critical level.

        Strange, [sql-info.de] isn't it [tudelft.nl]?
        • Gee, people can post their opinions about stuff online. And other people can use it as proof of inferiority _all_ the damn time. Crazy thing, that internet.

          That same old "this is weird because I say so" / "this is broke but fixed in the latest release" website gets boring. Do your own research, come to your own conclusions.
          • MySQL has it place, but he said "mission critical level" and the links I posted has good enough explanations why that isn't MySQL's place. No need to duplicate it here.
            MySQL is fast and advanced enough for blogs and similar simple things where data integrity doesn't matter that much...
    • It makes for a more viable ecosystem, though. The more competitors there are, the more ideas are likely to be tried. And free software is not really on a do or die schedule. It doesn't go bankrupt, if success doesn't show up within two years.

      Mozilla could spend a leisurely four years rebuilding from scratch. As long as there are a few developers to keep the code compiling on the latest platforms, a project can even vegetate in near coma for years without terminal consequences. Look at the history of Postgr
    • I think half the slashdot crowd now-a-days speaks just for the heck for speaking and even goes on the extent of comparing Oracle against MySQL.
      Face it, while you may like open-source/BSD/MySQL/PostGreSQL they are no match for Oracle Database server. (lets keep iLearning etc. out of it)
      1) Stored Proc support in MySQL is only now added No triggers, foreign_key support (?) , and what is there with all this InnoDB/ISAM for transactional support ? All this lack of features is really a pain in ass if you have wo
      • if i have "Money" i would anyday buy Oracle

        Well, that's nice. You will need a lot of it. Have you priced Oracle lately? Unless you are a fairly good sized company, don't expect it to be affordable for use on a high-volume web site. A small cluster running on $50K worth of hardware was around a million dollars last time I got a quote. Sorry, I can do one HELL of a lot of development to work around any limitations based on missing features in mysql for that money. That list of missing features is shrinking

  • really open source? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geg81 ( 816215 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:34PM (#10695837)
    it calls a Trusted Open Source License. Despite retaining control over the products and features generated by the open source community, the Islandia, N.Y.-based company has generated a lot of interest in Ingres.


    If CA "retains control over the products and features", then it doesn't sound like it's open source. It's only open source if people have the right to fork the project and make incompatible changes. And that's an important ability because that is what, ultimately, keeps the original developers on their toes.

  • Anyone know how flexible the license is? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jbwiv ( 266761 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:45PM (#10695938)
    Is it more BSD-like, or more GPL-like? Can commercial companies use it without paying CA for commercial licenses?

    The PostgreSQL license is what keeps drawing me back to it (aside from being a frickin' awesome database)...I can use it as much as I want without paying exorbitant fees. My company does, however, donate back to the community as much as possible.
    • Since you use this in a bussiness, you might want to know that the lisence reads:

      Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.

      That "without fee" is a misplaced modifier, the intent is that you don't have to pay those things to do them, but the way it reads it means that you

    • Don't forget about the FireBird [sourceforge.net] database which is under a renamed MPL v1.1.

      Fyracle [janus-software.com] is a side project that allows FireBird to work directly with Oracle SQL extensions and I believe also their Stored Procedures. It also allows Compiere [compiere.org] to work with an open source DB instead of Oracle. Most of the cost was in licensing Oracle in a Compiere solution so this looks very promising.

  • Can't go past Oracle (Score:1, Insightful)

    by cuteseal ( 794590 )
    It'll be hard to compete against Oracle, who is already a player in the linux market. I attended one of the Oracle-Compaq (well, now HP) conferences last year, where they were pushing linux clustering and Oracle using RAC. Oracle is tried and true, and it would take a lot of persuasion and golfing junkets to get enterprises to go down another path, methinks.

    • Re:Can't go past Oracle (Score:3, Insightful)

      by geg81 ( 816215 )
      It'll be hard to compete against Oracle, who is already a player in the linux market.

      Yes, in particular since the reason most people use Oracle is the fact that everybody is running it ("you don't get fired for running the same DB software as all the other financial institutions"), not that it is necessarily actually faster or more reliable. It's hard to compete with that.
    • Yeah, it was so hard for me to persuade my client to use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle...

      Oracle: $6K for a single-processor license. We are planning to deploy a custom made application to at least 2 sites, so that's $12K right there. Plus $6K for every new site.
      PostgreSQL: $0.

      They only asked me about stability and features. PostgreSQL has stored procedures, transactions, replication, indexes... all we need. Stability? I did some stress tests and it works OK for out application.

      We're deploying PostgreSQL f
      • > Oracle: $6K for a single-processor license.

        That's probably incorrect. Maybe for 10g Standard (the lowest-end stuff). 9i RAC is $60K per processor.

        > PostgreSQL has stored procedures, transactions, replication, indexes... all we need.

        Because your company, like most others, doesn't need much - you could probably use Ingress, Sybase (for DB under 5GB) or some other free-license database.

        SQL Server, not Oracle, is threatened by Ingres, PostreSQL et al.
        Considering convenient backup, monitoring, tuning

  • I recommend looking elsewhere for an RDBMS. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Monday November 01, 2004 @10:42PM (#10696377) Homepage

    The Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL) apparently qualifies as an "open source" license, but it would probably not qualify as a "free software" license. The focus on user's software freedom found in the free software movement is important in interpreting what powers the license grants and what the license claims to regulate.

    Section 10.1 tries to control use of the program--if one's rights under the license terminates, the license claims that that user's rights to use the program terminate as well. But the FSF tells us that US copyright law doesn't permit setting conditions on merely running a computer program (outside of a license or encryption manager) [gnu.org] and that if this were to become accepted, would extend copyright law in a dangerous way. This was part of the rationale for saying the first and second revisions of the Apple Public Source License were not free software licenses.

    Section 11.4 of the CATOSL claims that no licensee will bring a legal action under the license more than once a year. When one does bring a legal action, one is supposed to waive a jury trial and hold the trial in the state of New York. Licensees in other districts may enjoy rights which the state of New York does not recognize or grant, including the right to bring suit more than once a year; rights licensees would want to retain should they need to go to court.

    I'm sure a more thorough examination of the CATOSL would reveal more problems for users. I don't recommend getting involved with programs licensed under the CATOSL. This shouldn't pose a practical problem for anyone because there are excellent database programs under more amenable licenses, including PostgreSQL (licensed under the new BSD license) [postgresql.org] and MySQL (licensed under the GNU GPL) [mysql.com]. I also don't recommend licensing one's own programs under the CATOSL.

  • Ok, first, I'm no Microsoft fan, but if you are a Microsoft shop, and you want commercial support, there's little choice but to use SQL Server. It's a logical choice given the circumstances.

    Second, I've seen a bit of Oracle, and watched our DBAs tearing hair out over mismatches in certifications (we are forced to use RH AS2.1 for their iLearning product where I work, where everything else happily runs on EL3). However, if you're not trying to make a whole bunch of suites of Oracle software work together
  • It's a start. But given that one of CA's goals is for "Ingres to become the dominant Open Source RDBMS amongst ISV and the Open Source development community [ca.com]", they have a long way to go.

    Ther are only Linux x86 and Windows builds so far, and only RPM-packaged binaries are provided. You are also required to create an account on their project site to download (!).

    And the license may be "open source", but it is not "free software".

    CA seems to want it both ways -- they want to release the product as open s

    • Actually, the text that has been quoted is from the BETA1 README of Ingres r3 on Windows. My understanding is that most of these issues from BETA1 have been fixed in the current GA release.

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