Thread: Ingres II Open Source RDBMS

If a DBA were to select a database man¬agement system about a decade ago, he had very few vendors to choose from. There was Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server. But before Sybase or even SQL Server came into existence as an industry scale re¬lational database management systems, there was Ingres that had established itself as an RDBMS.

Ingres can be rightly termed as the 'granddaddy' of all the relational databases as it has been a well-known name in the database business for long, and now it is available as open source. Ingres is a high performance and highly scalable database systems, which also has features for higher availability, backup capability and higher level of security that matches the best of any other open source database product.

In this article we'll look at how Ingres has progressed from a funded research project to an enterprise-class database sys¬tem, and also a hands-on experience with this database system and its mgmt func¬tionalities INteractive Graphics and REtrieval System," Ingres was a research project at University of California, Berkeley, started in early 1970s for a relational database research. The Ingres source code was available at a modest fee and several companies use the Ingres source code to build products. The core Ingres code not only forms the base of Ingres Database, but also forms the foundation of several other industry-leading RDBMS systems as well, like PostgreSql.



Two scientists, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, who worked on this relational database research project, founded a company named Relational Tech¬nology Inc in 1980 to market Ingres prod¬ucts. The company converted the Ingres code to incorporate various front-end tools for creating and manipulating the databases. They also started introducing application de¬velopment tools and distributed database concepts with Ingres.

This was the time when Ingres leaded Oracle in the industry database system. Ingres had been one of the first database systems to introduce advanced features like triggers and stored procedures. While Oracle was concentrated toward SQL compatibility, Ingres stuck to the Quel sup¬port from the Ingres research project. This could be attributed as a drawback for the de¬cline in Ingres market as customers favored Oracle over Ingres. Though Oracle was backed by better marketing, Ingres lacked that and as a result it wasn't well known in the industry. Then in 1994 the company was taken over by Computer Associates who of¬fered Ingres under various brands like Open¬Ingres and Ingres II. The first open source