Ingres and Open Source - a success story

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I have espoused the cause of Ingres for some time and, especially, I have commended Computer Associates' decision to take the Ingres database into the open source community.

Now, I dare say that at some point CA will tell me all about its "open source challenge" and how successful that has been in developing new facilities for Ingres. And they will also tell me about how many downloads there have been (though I am cynical about the utility of such a figure). But this article is about one company, Datallegro, which has adopted Ingres as its database.

Datallegro is a vendor in the data warehouse space that develops and markets an appliance–based solution. That is, a combination of hardware and software similar in concept (if not in method) to that which underpinned the original development of Teradata. The company is headed up by Stuart Frost, who was the founder and CEO of Select Software and subsequently chairman of Avellino.

Datallegro is an open source based product to the extent that it runs on Linux and uses Ingres as its database. However, it wasn't always like that. Originally, it was developed using MySQL. For performance reasons, this was quite quickly replaced with PostgreSQL. Bear in mind that at this time, Ingres was not available as an open source product. When it became available, Datallegro evaluated Ingres and rapidly made the decision to jump ship from PostgreSQL to Ingres (not too difficult, as they share common origins). This says quite a lot about the relative robustness, performance, scalability, and so on of MySQL versus PostgreSQL versus Ingres.

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