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Programming Linux Business Technology

CA Dangles $1M Bounty for Ingres Conversion Tools 121

Posted by simoniker from the puppet-on-a-string dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Computer Associates, on the heels of their announcement that they were moving to the service and support model, hence open sourcing Ingres, is set to announce a $1 million bounty for Ingres conversion tools [the idea being, obviously, to convert to Ingres, rather than away from it]. The bounty announcement coincides with the official announcement of the downloadability of the new, open-source Ingres. An earlier Information Week article rues the passing of Jasmine, which was a great idea, and, although perhaps a few years [maybe a decade?] ahead of its time, still the sort of thing that people like me could sure benefit from. Hint, hint..."
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CA Dangles $1M Bounty for Ingres Conversion Tools More

CA Dangles $1M Bounty for Ingres Conversion Tools

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  • hmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by manavendra ( 688020 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:35AM (#9887226) Homepage Journal
    I suppose some time ago it would have been ironic that corporations are pushing their products into open source, rather than fighting it... however, now with open source software (and the movement) reaching the critical mass, they can no longer fight the tide, and have decided to ride with it.

    This still made me smile though:
    "Linux has proved you can have a successful commercial business around open source," Barrenechea says. "The innovation model in high tech is no longer constrained to corporations, no longer constrained to universities, no longer constrained to venture capitalists, but now is open to a million developers strong who want to contribute."
    (quote of Mark Barrenechea, senior VP of product development for CA. )

    • Re:hmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mumblestheclown ( 569987 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:39AM (#9887238)
      however, now with open source software (and the movement) reaching the critical mass

      I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be modded up to +5, insightful. I also have no doubt whatsoever that your statement is bald zealotry. If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords..

      more realistically, what CA did is called a no-risk offer. They post some bounty which is worth far less than what true development would cost them plus get some free publicity to book. and if it doesn't work out? well, nothing lost by them.

      • Re:hmm.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by manavendra ( 688020 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:54AM (#9887276) Homepage Journal
        I agree with you to a large extent, but my statement wasn't related to a one-off announcement by CA, though it certainly was a constitute.

        Here are some others:


        This is by no means a complete list. I wish I had more time for this post, but I don't think its worth the effort

        I also have no doubt whatsoever that your statement is bald zealotry
        Oh really? How is musing about the subtle change in tones of software companies towards open source a fanatical devotion to cause [reference.com]?

        If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords..
        Sure, corporate adoption isn't what we'd like it to be. But neither do we expect things to change overnight. But the very fact that rather than standing firm against it, or suing it, they have started exploring it, smacks of a change in stance and outlook towards open source software. Pretty soon they will figure out way to make money with this change of stance. Which is what the ultimate success of open source software will be - availability of a larger pool of free software, yet the people developing it being paid.
        • IBM Wont Use Patents Against Linux

          I'm sure that they mean it at the moment, but things change, be they attitudes, situations, or the people in charge.

          Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that IBM is lying - just that what they intend today doesn't necessarily hold tomorrow. IBM isn't supporting Linux out of the goodness of their collective hearts - they're doing it because it helps them in their core business, selling hardware and services. Pissing off MS is a nice to have, too, I'd imagine. If Linux ever
        • HP and Open Source

          Hardware company that treats software as an afterthought sees a way to sell more printers.

          IBM Open source projects

          Ah yes, IBM. (puts pinkie finger to side of mouth). Still trying to find the solution that will make them A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. (dr evil laugh).

          IBM Wont Use Patents Against Linux

          Quite an accomplishment. Good project, that.

          Software giants feel open source pressure

          Sure, some. But critical mass means it has its own momentum. I highly doubt that and the arti

          • Unless you were aiming for the dr. evil part 1 and not the part 2, I think you need to revise your statement to A HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS, at least. Tivoli alone did US$1B in sales when I last worked for IBM.

      • Re:hmm.. (Score:3, Informative)

        by value_added ( 719364 )

        Assuming you're still in the mood for "bald zealotry" ...

        Lambasting the proprietary front, Donofrio [senior vice president, technology and manufacturing, IBM] said, "The forces that cling to proprietary, closed ways of doing things are doing nothing to advance innovation. When you box people in, and create artificial barriers to solving problems, you can't expect creative, innovative solutions to spring forward."

        Re-asserting IBM's love for Open Source systems, he explained, "Over the next decade, you'

      • Re:hmm.. (Score:5, Funny)

        by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:12AM (#9887322)
        It's not the bald zealots you need to worry about. It's the hairy ones that concern me ;)

      • Re:hmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Clovert Agent ( 87154 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:13AM (#9887325)
        "Marginal"? Google is marginal? Apache's 67.7% marketshare [netcraft.com] is marginal? You may have also heard of sendmail. Or bind.

        Outside of background infrastructure there are Linux deployment stories on nearly a daily basis in IT press. Open your eyes - I don't think OSS is remotely "marginal". Still some way from "widespread", never mind "commonplace" or "ubiquitous", but hardly "marginal". Unless you have some new and interesting definition of that term?

        Your no-risk analysis of CA's move is correct, I think - it probably also applies to IBM+Cloudscape to a degree. But painting FOSS as only existing in "marginal projects here and there" is clearly bollocks.

        Critical mass, to my mind, will come when vendors start offering Linux versions of their software by default. I've seen a steady trend away from "oh, you have to use Windows/IE/Exchange" in product announcements (I cover security products - so there's a server slant to what I see), but it's not yet commonplace to have Linux support. Growing, though, and I don't think Microsoft is ignorant of that.

        • Lies, damn lies, and ... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05, 2004 @07:12AM (#9887515)
          Apache's 67.7% marketshare is marginal?

          No but it's irrelevant. A couple of years ago when I was doing the web startup thing numbers like the one above were tracked very religiously. HOWEVER, like the saying goes, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics". One of the decisions that our incredibly insightful mgmt made was to not support Netscape as a web server, citing the Netcraft #'s that showed it had a very small percentage of the market, esp compared to Apache. Well guess what, what they didn't take into account was that when you're trying to sell enterprise products, it's quality, not quanity that counts. All those websites running Apache were for the most part ma and pa/joe nerd websites. Pretty much everyone running Netscape was a Fortune 500 company. Gee, guess who's gonna spend >$10K for an enterprise web solution, the 1000 guys who downloaded Apache to run their blogs and Natalie Portman tribute sites, or Bank of America?

          • Re:Lies, damn lies, and ... (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Well guess what, what they didn't take into account was that when you're trying to sell enterprise products, it's quality, not quanity that counts. All those websites running Apache were for the most part ma and pa/joe nerd websites. Pretty much everyone running Netscape was a Fortune 500 company. Gee, guess who's gonna spend >$10K for an enterprise web solution, the 1000 guys who downloaded Apache to run their blogs and Natalie Portman tribute sites, or Bank of America?

            If Apache can handle Amazon's tr [netcraft.com]

            • Re:Lies, damn lies, and ... (Score:1, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Don't blame Apache because your management was too cheap to purchase a decent enterprise solution. Apache is used in both ma and pop web sites as well as in the enterprise

              Dude, you missed the point entirely. For starters, mgmt wasn't looking to purchase, we were SELLING an enterprise solution and deciding which web servers to support. And I know that Apache is used top to bottom, the whole point of the reply was to point out that the market share numbers by themselves are useless in many cases because
          • Netscape as a web server

            I think a large part of your problem was in expecting Apache to function as an app server (which is what Netscape was[is?]) instead of a web server (which is what Apache is). Apache+Tomcat will give you a bare-bones app server, but nothing like a full-fledged app server (q.v. Web{Logic|Sphere}, JBoss).
          • First, it is true that SunOne, etc. are marginal in general, but used more extensively as app servers.

            However....

            It is also true that in the mean time, Apache has substantially encroached on the market of SuneOne, etc. Many are using it for app servers today.

            Of course, the real moral of the story is to make your apps use open standards so that they support as many platforms as possible.

      • Critical mass observation is accurate (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:17AM (#9887335)
        If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords.

        Critical mass and market share are two entirely different things. The fact that open source has only a small marketshare, as measured by the number of commercial applications, does not invalidate the idea that open source has "gone critical", ie. that its mindshare is now so big that it is "exploding" on the software scene.

        The metaphor from atomics isn't all that bad. Free and open source software (minus the labels) have now been around for decades, yet it is only in the last several years that they have appeared on the commercial radar, first as inconsequential, and now as a dire threat. In the world inhabited by Microsoft and friends, this is a real explosion in the software world.

      • Where I work (US DoD), I am definitely seeing a change in management attitude toward open-source.

        In fact the CIO of my organization (an army LTC) has stated openly that we will look at open source/open standards preferentially when making software choices.

        Case in point, we are standing up a student portal, and the choice is UPortal [uportal.org] with stand-up support from a commercial vendor.

        Like it or not, critical mass is being reached. It doesn't have so much to do with the individual applications as the mindset o

    • From the user perspective this is just free. Free is good and then the monopoly includes a free database in its OS. Gee, Linux is beating them to the punches. They gotta be fuming. And looking for some new tricks. Oh yeah, no mention of Interbase or Firebird here yet. PostGreSQL and that are probably the next things for me to check out.

  • So close... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zorilla ( 791636 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:36AM (#9887229)
    CUBIC*CUBE

    I think that square is top of cool shape in the world.

    Wait...the article isn't about Engrish? It's what? Ingres?! D'oh!

  • More info... (Score:4, Informative)

    by manavendra ( 688020 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:37AM (#9887232) Homepage Journal
    Just to make it clear, it isn't a single "bounty" of $1 million:
    CA will award five prizes totaling $1 million at CAWorld 2005 in Orlando, Fla., to individuals developing the best converters for moving customers from Oracle, Informix, DB2, SQL server, and Sybase databases to the Ingres database. The top prize could be worth as much as $500,000.

  • can I have a penny (Score:4, Funny)

    by mihal ( 753927 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:40AM (#9887241)
    if I write some Ingres-deletion tools?
  • First it was the big Linux guys -- Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. They GAVE AWAY their best products for FREE.

    Then Big Blue, good ol' IBM, does the unthinkable and embraces free software as well.

    Then we had Sun Microsystems consider doing the same with their Solaris beast and their Java libraries.

    Now even old-timers like Computer Associates are trying to get in on this model. Is this THE NEW WAVE OF THE FUTURE?

    Do we just GIVE AWAY SOFTWARE like it's nothing and then talk up our support staff and technical do
    • Ok, I don't think you understand Business, or a lot of OSS development.

      Given that a Company will use software to increase it's efficiancy and profitability.
      and
      Most oss development is fragmented, written by partimers and could stop being supported at any moment.

      Companies will pay people to keep the projects supported, they can't afford for the product to stop being supported.

      Companies will pay people to taylor the software to there particulat MO, this will give them a competitive advantage over other comp

    • Re:Is THIS the new industry STANDARD? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ph1ll ( 587130 ) <ph1ll1phenryNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:43AM (#9887411)
      We LOVE CODING too much to do that, so personally we're gonna keep doin what we love and selling it. Helping people with our products has never been fun anyway!

      I'm a coder. I love coding. I've been doing it for years.

      I also love free software and I don't see it as a threat to my livelihood. On the contrary, I think it will provide me with secure employment.

      Why? Because free, OSS software is useless by itself.

      JBoss is free. Tomcat is free. MySQL is free. But they are all worthless to my company until I write code that uses them. These little babies have been making me a good living for the last few years!

      I think OSS will accelerate the movement from software engineering being considered a manufacturing process to being accepted as a service. And I welcome that move.

      • "I think OSS will accelerate the movement from software engineering being considered a manufacturing process to being accepted as a service."

        I think this is a most insightful statement.

        I am working in a high order language (OSS based) and I find it absolutely wonderful to write a few lines of code that do so much. The project is one which always will have to be adapted to the current demand requests. Thus it is a service.

        This business of assuming that I will rewrite some Data base or some SQL thing t

  • Ingres? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Photo ( 640363 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:54AM (#9887277) Journal
    [the idea being, obviously, to convert to Ingres, rather than away from it]

    Otherwise, they'd call it Egress...

    • Re:Ingres? (Score:2, Funny)

      by raarky ( 653241 )
      I wonder how big the reward would be if you coded away from ingres? maybe $-1m in the form of lawsuits?

    • Re:Ingres? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:26AM (#9887358)
      Egress, you say? I'd think getting away from Ingres would be considered 'Progress'.
      • I benchmarked Ingres in the late 1980s. It was half the speed of Oracle then. And 1/50 of the speed of a dedicated Network (Codasyl) model for the same data.

        The benchmarks were all done on the same machine, using the same data, and as close to the same data model as could be had vs the various DBMSes involved.

        Needless to say, we didn't use it for anything after that.
        • You do realise that technology has moved on quite a bit in the last 15 years?

          I use Ingres (Advantage Ingres 2.6) on a daily basis, and although I haven't done any specific benchmarking, the general day to day use of it is absolutely fine performance-wise (this is on databases up to about 50GB).

          I've only used Ingres for 5 years, but in that time, I have seen four different versions (6.4, OpenIngres 1.2, Ingres II 2.0 and now Advantage Ingres 2.6). There have been some pretty major developments since 1990..

    • Re:Ingres? (Score:3, Funny)

      by rasjani ( 97395 )
      Not, Egress.

      Logically it would be Postgres

  • Ingres.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @05:59AM (#9887287)
    No relation to Ingsoc? ;)

  • The most incredible thing about this story (Score:3, Insightful)

    by evronm ( 530821 ) <evronm@NoSpam.dtcinc.net> on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:04AM (#9887299) Homepage

    To me, the most amazing thing about this story is that it's not really that big a deal. Sure, it merits the ./ front page, but it really isn't that earth shattering.

    Five years ago, it would have been positively mind blowing! This just shows how far open source has come. And for those of us who have been hawking open source since the 90's, it's truly gratifying to read a story like this, say "Cool, another little win," and move on.

    • Actually, I disagree. The story from Ingres' perspective is that they're looking to puff up their database via open source techniques.

      However, from an open source perspective, you've got a major database open sourced AND a corporation pumping money (via a bounty) into the open source community.

      That money, if you're a good coder and have the right team, is there for the taking.

      This is a good thing. Not a yawn by any stretch of the imagination.
      • This is a good thing. Not a yawn by any stretch of the imagination.

        This is by no means a yawn. It is, in fact a very good thing, and newsworthy. My point is, Borland has already done this. There are plenty of great open source databases out there. This is good, but by no means incredible like it would have been merely 5 years ago.

  • if they'll go ahead and pony up the money to Informatica or some other ETL vendor who already does this? Informatica only needs an odbc driver. Of course you'll still need to do the mappings and create the workflows yourself.

    Then again Informatica has caused us no end of grief so maybe they'll pay the money to them to stop doing business ;)

  • can anyone tell us (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:46AM (#9887428)
    how Ingres compares to MySQL, Posgresql, Oracle?

    • Re:can anyone tell us (Score:4, Funny)

      by imag0 ( 605684 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @07:22AM (#9887543) Homepage
      [how Ingres compares to MySQL, Posgresql, Oracle?]

      So far, all I got is: The others aren't offering a million dollars for conversion tools.

      Hope that helps! ;)

    • Re:can anyone tell us (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Here are a few key Oracle differences:

      - Locking: Oracle supports non-escalating row-level locking. Locks are "internally attributed" and are not a finite resource. (Ingres will escalate locks to the page and table level, as locks are a finite resource.)

      - Consistency: Oracle does not use read locks to enforce non-blocking readers/writers. Oracle's multi-version consistency model supports Read Committed isolation by default and is less cumbersome than Ingres's locking strategy.

      - Clustering: Oracl
    • Well, it's been a while, but the last time I used Ingres, was to be polite, not a pleasent experience.

      Ingres had a locking scheme that positively sucked. It had a scheme were rows existed in "pages" (re, oracle's DB_BLOCK_SIZE), and these "pages" then made up tables. If any session had write locks to more than 10 "pages" it would escalate the lock to the entire table. Caused all sorts of multiuser update issues.

      Can't speak for the newer Ingres version though.

      MySQL doesn't have real transaction processing m

      • You are correct that Ingres "groups" rows into pages. This is a definable parameter (2k, 4k, 8k, 16k, 32k, 64k page sizes). If you use 4k pages or greater, you get the benefit of row level locking.

        Lock escalation is also a definable parameter. The locking system is actually quite sophisticated and can be tuned depending on your application requirements.
    • Ingres is at its heart a very solid product, although it has a lot of nagging little foibles, and its managament interface is truly awful and primitive. It is considerably stronger at its heart than MySQL and Posgresql, with a very powerful and robust query engine coupled to an excellent transactional framework. Compared to Oracle, it's about where Oracle was in the early 90's. The main philosophical difference between Ingres and Oracle is that Ingres tries to use the resources of the underlying OS more (
      • "The current version of Ingres, usually known as OpenIngres II 2.x (which says something about the power of marketing divisions) is essentially the same as 6.4/05 which was in use in the mid 90's."

        Maybe for small values of "current" and "essentially".

        It hasn't been OpenIngres for a good 6 years.

        Some of the underlying architecture is similar to 6.4/05, but there have been major feature advances since then, not even counting the r3 stuff.

  • used to work with a guy who knew ingres (Score:5, Funny)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:51AM (#9887447)

    I used to work with a guy who knew ingres; MIT's technology licensing office used it, and it ran on a dec alphaserver running..openVMS. He had guaranteed job security, pretty much.

    Too bad the head of the TLO office was a real bitch, but at least never around- she was also some bigwig at a bio research "organization" (read, somebody's tax shelter).

    Some fun stuff used to happen though- I sat next to the woman who handled royalty checks to the professors and stuff. One professor "lost" a +$100,000 check. After harassing the crap out of her(screaming, threats of legal action because she couldn't get a new check to him IMMEDIATELY) over the phone, he called back with his tail between his legs- the new tenant at his OLD APARTMENT found it tucked into a MAGAZINE on his coffee table.

    She turned to me and said "if you had just gotten a check worth over $100,000, what would you do with it?" "Run my ass right down to the bank as fast as I could and cash it." "Exactly! Not, say, 'tuck into magazine and leave magazine on my coffee table and then forget about it and move apartments'". She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...

    • She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...

      A similar and possibly authentic story is told about Einstein [around.com]:

      Meanwhile, like any demigod, he accreted bits of legend. That he opened a book and found an uncashed $1,500 check he had left as a bookmark (maybe--he was absent-minded about everyday affairs). That he was careless about socks, collars, slippers . . .

      While Einstein was known to be unfailingly polite, Newton [blupete.com] "had a suspicious and quarrelsome temper" and was "ver

    • Good story. Unfortuntely this kind of moronic behavior is not confined to academia, it's been an epidemic in private business for as long as I can remmember (which is a long time, I was a junior in high school when I got my first job -- the summer of the first OPEC oil embargo). About a year or two ago someone wrote a book about what it takes to be successful as a business or government leader. Pretty much the thesis was that being mean was the key. That's why I.T. people can't rule the world, most of us a

  • Damn... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Siener ( 139990 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @06:58AM (#9887471) Homepage
    I was very exited about this as I have extensive SQL Server knowledge as well as some Ingres experience. As it turns out however, I can't enter. The PDF with the terms and conditions [ca.com] contains this paragraph:

    The contest is intended for presentation in the United States, Canada
    (except Quebec Province), Mexico, India, China, United Kingdom,
    Australia, and New Zealand. Do not proceed in this site if you are not a
    resident of one of those countries.

    (In the actual document, it's in all CAPS, but the lameness filter prevents me from posting it that way)

    I live in South Africa. Oh well...

    • Re:Damn... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 )
      You do the work, I'll pass it off as my own, and we can split the bounty.

      --
      • Kind of a new version of the Nigerian scam:
        Dear Sir,
        I have a big project I need to submit from the states, but I live in South Africa. If I do not get the one million (1,000,000) US dollars bounty, I will die of death. If you will help me I will give you one hundred thousand american (US) dollars (100,000). Please contact me right away, so I can transfer the project to you. Just give me your bank account number.
    • Excellent.

      Most Excellent.

      It appears from your list that CA has cleverly excluded the french [google.ca] from their little contest. Even the pseudo-french in Canada (Which as we all know, is the home to the largest collection of frechmen to never surrender to the Germans!) :P
      • Even the pseudo-french in Canada

        Because Quebec has screwed up laws about all sorts of contests. Most of the time you will see this disclaimer "Not valid for residents of Quebec". It not shocking.

        Don't know about French laws though.

    • It's supposed to be Open Source. How can these types of restrictions be valid or mandatory in context of OSS? It doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's for political reasons, but then it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense either.

      • The contest/bounty is limited, dickbrain (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You can do what you want, and write what you want, but you're not eligible for one of the prizes unless you're from one of the listed countries.
    • All I know is that it's some sort of legal thing. I have no clue what, though. It wasn't meant as a "let's keep the scum out" thing, that's for sure.
  • What can Ingres do for me that Postgres cannot?

    I ask this question hoping an Ingres fan was waiting for this opportunity.
    • I havent been following lately on postgres development but way back when i used to work who shipped Ingres as core platform, postgres clustering /master/slave thing wasnt up to par with Ingres.
    • The open-source site has a paper [ca.com] that highlights some of Ingres's features. That would be a good place to start.
    • A number of neat things.

      We run Ingres on OpenVMS as the core behind one of our business critical systems. Also, I use postgres a lot for other, smaller, projects. Here's my partial list o' features:
      • Point in time database recovery
      • Tablespaces
      • Industrial grade, garunteed coherent backups
        (note you can do something like this using LVM snaphots underneath postgres, but it's a hack)
      • Fantastic admin tools, so that I can easily, for instance, find a session holding a blocking lock or running a resource
      • Thank you.

      • Re:Why convert? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by davegaramond ( 632107 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @12:06PM (#9890477)

        PITR: check. Postgres 8.0 now has it.

        Tablespaces: check. Postgres 8.0 now has it.

        Flexible, Coherent backups: check. Postgres 8.0 does this via PITR.

        Runs on VMS. Generally irrelevant considering VMS is no longer manufactured. Any other platforms Ingres runs that Postgres doesn't? On the other hand, there are people that already port Postgres to PDA/Zaurus/etc.

        I haven't done any reading regarding Ingres' other features, but it will be interesting to see whether Ingres has [the alternative of] stuffs like BYTEA/TEXT ("inline" blobs), PL's in many languages (Perl, C, Ruby, Python, Tcl, Java, Mono C#, PHP, PL/PGSQL), MVCC, partial index (index on only some rows of a table), regex, nested transaction/savepoint, full text search, object relational features (like table inheritance), and a bunch of convenient data types like arrays, geometry types, IPv4/IPv6, arbitrary precision numbers, etc.

    • It can put you in CA hell. Everyone I've ever talked to that did much business with CA is sorry they did. But maybe you could be the exception...
      • Uh, you might try reading the post. It's *open source*. You don't need to do any business with CA unless you want support. I can think of any number of reasons for wanting CA support, but you don't *have to*.
        • If you're a big business you're likely going to want support. If you're not a big business, then postgres will likely suit your needs, and maybe even suit them better than ingres.
          • >If you're a big business you're likely going to want support. If you're not a big business, then postgres will likely suit your needs, and maybe even suit them better than ingres.

            If you're not a big business then - what the hell! - they're the same both are free and you can't afford to pay for support anyway.

            Seems that PostreSQL loses in both cases?

    • I'm not too familar with Postgres, but I can say that Ingres scales very well in business-critical enivironments. Some of our customer databases reach 50GB without any problems. Supporting several thousand concurrent users works well. These are users running proper client/server applications, not just web databases.

      I honestly don't know if postgres scales this well. Does anyone have comparative results?
  • netsol's registry is ingres

  • What is Ingres? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rtos ( 179649 ) on Thursday August 05, 2004 @07:43AM (#9887624) Homepage
    For those of you who (like me) had vaguely heard of "Ingres" but had no idea what it really is, let me save you trouble of Googling.

    Quoth the ever-helpful Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

    "
    Ingres [wikipedia.org] was an early relational database system, created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley starting in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1980s. The code, like that from other projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of the BSD license. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres had spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, SQL Server, NonStop SQL, Informix and a number of others. A follow-on project started in the mid-1980s as Postgres, leading to the development of PostgreSQL [postgresql.org], Illustra, and later versions of Informix. By any measure, Ingres is one of the most influential modern computer research projects."
    So Ingres is more than just backdoors running on 1524/tcp. ;)

    Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

    • Here's a full article at daemonnews about the history [daemonnews.org] of postgresql.

      It would be interesting if someone would benchmark these, noting the similarities and differences between the two now that ingres is open source. Also, maybe the pgsql development team could learn a thing or two by studying what CA did with ingres over the years. Maybe there is still some common code and design paradigms left between the two.
      • Considering the PostgreSQL guys have rewritten significant portions of PostgreSQL, even in the last couple of years, I wouldn't hold my breath for there being very much common code left.

  • Be careful... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05, 2004 @08:39AM (#9888111)
    Computer Associates will buy your company, chew on it until its got all the flavor, then spit you out. My company started a data warehouse with Platinum software (great a metadata and data movement), then Platinum was bought by these guys, and CA halted development. We had to sue them to get our project money back.

    CA has been buying companies for years [winnetmag.com], and not necessarily in a good way [techweb.com] for consumers.

    "At No. 4, we have Computer Associates. The current federal investigation into accounting irregularities notwithstanding, the company's longtime practice of acquiring aging technologies, slashing new development, and attempting to milk the installed base for service and support is a bigger issue. Users are trapped, CA knows it, and it does its best to take advantage of the situation."
    • Yeah, tell me about it.

      We've got some mainframe old skool file transfer software that we've had running for about 15 years.

      Then, one day, CA buys it and kills our license for it.

      For no reason.

      We'd be happy to keep paying the 10,000/yr license fee, but they stopped renewing all licenses for it.

      Steven V.

      • For 15 years I have said to anyone who listens is that their company motto is wrong. It should say "Software Superior by Acquisition".
  • ca always has and always will be the absolute worst software company on the planet. they blow chunks, spewing worthless products all over our computers for years and years.
  • corrupt my database beyond repair. I don't know about you guys, but my experience with Ingres on Linux has not been fun. Ingres is packaged with Arcserve for all database needs. It unfortunately has an uncanny knack for dying repeatedly regardless of regular pruning of old entries and applying extensions (recommended by CA). It seems that extending the database only prolongs the inevitable. Is this only a Linux thing? Does the problem exist on other platforms? CA could only recommend workarounds.
  • Why does TFA never mention Postgres. Anyone have any insight into why CA thinks playing catch-up with Ingres would be better than scrapping it in favor of Postgres?
  • one could argue working a fixed salary is much better than wasting your time chasing a bounty. If they have 1 million dollars to spend why don't they just hire some developers to make this thing and open sources it?

    • They probably asked for a quote and were told it would cost $2 million to develop it in house. So they thought "let put a bounty on it.".

      Depending on how poor there in house design methodology is, this could be a fair deal. Of course it assumes can't (too bureacratic? too much middle management?) upgrade there business model to allow for a more cost effetive methodology.

      I.E. If they are like most businesses, they are ineffecient and know they are ineffecient. Unlike most companies they said, "Hey, let

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 )
    Why would anybody want to migrate towards a new Open Source database server when there are already two, one of which is its own bastard cousin? See, if the fact of your DB server being Open Source is that vitally important -- say, a "no source, no sale" procurement policy -- then you will already have chosen one of the Big Two:

    PostgreSQL is an indirect descendant of an earlier version of Ingres; and, having been Open Source all along, ought to have improved slightly faster than the original Ingres proje
    • Ingres does many things that postgres does not. You might not need those things, but they are there for those who do.

      As you say, Postgres is a full-fledged database, and MySQL is fast as hell but doesn't do very much unless you're into Java, and even then you have to make it do all that stuff, it won't just do it for you. Hence, it doesn't do much but it's fine for holding the data for forums, blogs, logs, and online stores.

      Open Source is not the defining factor. The feature set is. "Switching to open s

    • Postgres... It has a reputation for slowness; but, then again, so does Ingres.

      Postgres *had* the reputation for slowness. That was back in the days of 6.4-6.5. Nowadays it's generally quite fast. You can even compare it head to head with MySQL in many cases. But when it comes to features, Postgres just blows MySQL away...

    • Two?

      What about firebird [firebirdsql.org]? It's got almost all the features of postgres and runs on windows and has a small footprint.
  • Now, its been pointed out that they are not offering 1 million, but several prizes adding up to that sum. And this total is obviously less than actually developing the product itself would be for them.

    However, I think in the future, it is fair that OS developers get paid a large amount of money even if its not near what the company would have to pay. Its a lot for an individual, and its basically freelance work for a LOT of money. I don't really see a problem with this pricing, except with the fact that

    • Let's be clear, whether or not $1M is a bargain or the going rate, CA is NOT doing this because of the cost. They're doing it for a) publicity and b) to get people involved with the Ingres source.

      Releasing Ingres into open source is one thing - actually attracting developers to work with them is another and this is a way to kickstart that process.

      Oh, and, the entries will be open source and the ownership will remain with the developers - so CA don't 'get to keep the entries' any more than any one else.
  • Jasmine is not to be missed. It was yet another of those aberrations, an OORDBMS - or in other words, a contradiction in terms.

    While current Ingres also violates the relational model by grafting SQL misfeatures even to its QUEL flavour, it perhaps could be made sane.

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