Open Source Ingres for Linux

[Francois Ouellette]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "CLIFFORD ILKAY" <clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>
To: <tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>
Sent: Wednesday, 16 March, 2005 18:23
Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Open Source Ingres for Linux
>
> 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
> <etc>

Forum nevertheless. I never used it!

> 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 "Complementary
> Products" that I know are not Open Source. I have nothing against paying
for
> <snip>
If you follow the links posted on the Ingres page:
http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres/files/ab.int.lnx.ga/ingres-3.0.1.109-readme.zip
you would have learned that the package comes with the RDBMS,
character-based query tools,
reporting tools, ABF and Vision development tools, character-based forms
editor, database Replicator,
pre-compilers for C and other 3GL, XML export/import utility, admin tools,
gateways including JDBC, etc

The Complemantary Products are such things as a OO GUI called OpenROAD which
is not Open Source
and must be purchased separately. It can work with Ingres and most other
RDBMS. Was originally the
OO development tool for Ingres.

Again, if you spend some minutes reading the licence agreement (also a link
on the page)
http://www3.ca.com/Files/Licensing/trusted_open_source_license.pdf
it says that CA remains the proprietor of the original source code. No fee
to download or use the product.
If you want to change the code you can and must indicate in your changes
which code is yours.  Simple, no?

> 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
> <snip>
The 4GL stuff is ABF (Application By Forms) and Vision, an application
generator
which are the oldish character-based technology products. It does come with
the package.

> 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.

Highly interactive and transactional Customer Care system for a cellphone
company with
3,000,000 subscribers, billing jobs, communications to the switches to
activate phones, etc with 2-tier and n-tier clients.
Platform was Alpha 8400-series (at the time) under clustered Tru64 with
modest 440 Mhz CPU's.
Several databases totaling about 300 GB and 300 to 400 tables each.

I don't understand the aggressivity of the people who responded to my
original post! I was just mentioning
that Ingres was now available and worth looking at. The product was
originally released in the late 1970's and today's
open source version is the next of a series of releases that were developed
since then.

The replies that came back seem to come from people who know nothing about
the
product and make (uninformed) statements about its quality or functionality
:-)
Ingres, as noted before, was a product whose development was driven by
Michael Stonebreaker, ask him if he knew about ACID transactions!

Perhaps what we need is an Open Mind community to go with the Source :-)

Openly yours,

  François Ouellette
<fouellet-cpI+UMyWUv9BDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>






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