Open Source Ingres for Linux

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On March 16, 2005 13:05, Francois Ouellette wrote:
> > Christopher Browne wrote:
> > <snip>
> > SAP-DB is "open source," but there is certainly no public community
> > around it.  Just like with MySQL(tm), OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and
> > other such products, they are _really_ commercial products with some
> > veneer of "try it for free."
> > <snip>
> > I can't see that Ingres is that much different.  It may be that its
> > source code is less unreadable than SAP-DB, but it would seem
> > surprising for it to become of any great interest to the community at
> > large particularly when there are already vibrant communities of
> > developers surrounding other systems (notably PostgreSQL).
> > --
>
> Having worked a bit with Adabas Natural at the time I can tell you it was
> not as interesting to use as Ingres or Oracle were, especially on the
> OpenVMS platform.
>
> I agree that Postgres and other products benefit from a "vibrant"
> community of contributors, and that putting Ingres in Open Source might
> have been was an elegant way for CA to "dispose of" a product without
> ditching it, letting others decide of its fate or success.
>
> Nevertheless I think Ingres r3 is still an interesting and mature product
> in the same league as the other major RDBMS products. Just do some
> research on "Ingres r3 Linux" and you will see that there is some interest
> out there, even active forums.

If this <http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres/forum> is the "active forum" 
you speak of, it does not inspire confidence. First, it is a molasses in 
February slow Plone installation that could be running on a Pentium II/233 
with 64M of RAM. In fact, the cursory Google search you suggested above 
yielded a post to a mailing list complaining about this fact in the first 10 
results. Second, neither the number of messages nor the activity level on the 
forum is encouraging, though it could be that people do not use the forum 
because forum software in general is a pain to use. Perhaps Ingres folks hang 
out in comp.databases.ingres. If you want to see an "active forum", try 
#postgresql or subscribe to a few of the PostgreSQL mailing lists. There is a 
culture in the Open Source community that most vendors of proprietary 
software do not understand and one of the cultural norms is that Open Source 
developers tend to prefer IRC and mailing lists as opposed to "web" forums.

Looking at the home page for the Ingres site, what parts are Open Source and 
what parts are proprietary is not clear. There are links to "Complemantary 
Products" that I know are not Open Source. I have nothing against paying for 
tools or software but I want to understand exactly what is free (as in libre 
and gratis) and what is not and I do not want to spend an inordinate amount 
of time reading software licenses trying to figure out in which ways the "CA 
Trusted Open Source License" is really open, or not. That CA felt it 
necessary to come up with Yet Another Open Source License alone is not a good 
indication. What was the rationale there? There is no explanation of that.

I do not mind dual licensing schemes such as MySQL's or Trolltech's for Qt. 
Commercial license for proprietary software and a free license for free 
software is fair and acceptable. How CA fits into that scheme of things, I do 
not know nor do I have the time or the inclination to find out as it is not 
obvious in what ways Ingres is going to make my life better as a developer. 
What problems does Ingres solve that I cannot solve with other tools, like 
PostgreSQL for example? Why would Ingres be interesting to someone who is not 
already using Ingres and has legacy applications to support?

In the PDF docs that I downloaded from the Ingres site, there are frequent 
references to the 4GL but I have no idea if that is also Open Source, not 
that I care as I have no interest in creating green screen apps. Being able 
to support 700 concurrent users without falling over is not an especially 
impressive feat as there are many databases out there that can do that, 
including MySQL and PostgreSQL. That fact alone does not confer any special 
status to a database especially when there are so many factors that affect 
performance. What are those 700 users doing? Is it highly transactional? Is 
it mostly reporting? How big is the database? How normalized is the data? How 
intensive are the queries? What sort of hardware is it running on? Powerful 
hardware masks a lot of ills. How ACID compliant is it? These are only a few 
of the variables. It is difficult to distill such a complex thing into 
quotable sound bites like "30 year history", "enterprise database, or "700 
users", at least not for a technical audience anyway.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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