An Ingres Blog

Hi Mark,

making Ingres a truly open source project will be a mammoth task. Whilst the initial focus of the new company has been to make sure the money keeps flowing in there are moves afoot to start to build communities around Ingres. When this will become visible to the outside is another question, which I am not in a position to answer. All I can say is there is a plan and we have discussed / will be discussing with partners what the changes will be.

On the development front Ingres Corp has been hiring new staff for Engineering roles ranging from new features to performance and bug fixing. I think it would be unfair to say the CA did not develop the product. However it would be fair to say that it did not give it the all attention it deserved. Certainly in the time I was there (from 1997 onwards) adoption by other CA products went from non-existent to part of the core strategy. They could not have done this if Ingres was the same product it was when CA bought ASK. The divestiture was the best thing that could have happened to Ingres.

As to 3rd party add-ins - I hope so, more the merrier. I would love to see more thingslike the Perl utilities.

grant

I'm a long time user of ingres, but my day to day involvement stopped at version 2.6. My biggest concern about the transition to open-source is the ability of people outside of ingres corp to take on the development of the database. If that doesn't happen, I'm not sure what the up-side of moving to open-source will be. However I'm sure that the new company will be much more focussed on development than was CA, and I hope to see some dynamic changes in the ability of ingres to inter-operate with external systems and the OS. A good sign of the vitality of the new Ingres would be an upsurge in the provision of 3rd-party tools, and I hope that Ingres Corp will resurrect the funding drive for open-source add-ins
that CA initiated.