On several occasions this year I’ve been prompted to mention in conversation Ingres as an alternative Open Source Database. Jonathan Levin in A list of Open-Source Alternatives to Business Applications was the latest example where Ingres was not mentioned and perhaps it should have been.

Want features like online backup, online alter, multi-master replication, parallel queries and partitioning. These are all long existing features in a more mature product then MySQL presently. Is this a sleeping giant that nobody remembers about? Ingres has been around a long time, in fact my experience extends back to 1988 (that’s 20 years).

From a product perspective they have created a number of pre-packaged product stacks, for example The Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance Powered by JasperSoft, something MySQL has failed to capitalize on. Another stack appliance for example is with Alfresco.

However since the CA announcement to open source Ingres back in 2004 I’ve not seen a great deal of press, at least not in the Open Source or MySQL circles. Time permitting myself it’s time again to look at Ingres. It’s worth another look and hopefully I can provide some translation for MySQL DBA’s and Developers. Also part of Ingres is ABF Application By Forms, an entire development environment. My use was back in the terminal days so I can only assume they have fully embraced the Web now.