> But in the last ten years, I have never once heard
> mention of Ingres in a commercial context. I was
> aware of it via "University Ingres"
> and because of knowing a little history, both of
> which came from academia, not from the commercial
> world.
>
> Consider:
> - Monster.com shows 13 jobs mentioning Ingres;
> - PostgreSQL gets you 55 hits.
>
Curious, my first post was in part motivated because
I also use Job Searching engines to calculate the
success of a product and I found Ingres was much more
used in comercial deployments than Postgresql. In
Jobserve.com:
- Postgresql related jobs: 5 vacancies
- Ingres related jobs: 55 vacancies
- SAPDB/MaxDB related jobs: 0 vacancies
Jobserve.com concentrates in European countries, and
mainly around "London financial World", so it looks in
Europe Ingres in much more widely used while the
opposite is true with Postgresql in the USA.
> Back to the Ingres question, it is _possible_ that
> the Ingres code base may be usable / maintainable /
> improvable. It is by no means guaranteed that this
> is so.
I think you are completly wrong in this point. One of
the great things of Ingres with respect to its
near/far future is that is a core element in more than
100 CA applications, where it comes blunded. So it
makes lots of sense for CA not to drop it and continue
to improve it so they don't get dependent on a Oracle
48.000$ licence/CPU that obiosly will more than double
the final cost of many CA products. CA has nearly
doubled the number of Ingres developers since it was
first planned to opensource it (that's at least what
CA proclaims) and they are working to port many of its
products, right now tied to Oracle databases, to
Ingres. That will means for CA dramatically reducing
cost, and an instant grow of its client base.
When I go to the Ingres website it gives me the
impression is a project really alive, and of course I
downloaded the Ingres documentation and found it
better documented and up to date than the Postgresql
one. A thing I really liked is that they constantly
compare Ingres to Oracle and DB2 in the docs,
emphasizing the points where Ingres is not yet as
mature as their rivals (XML support for example). This
is not a tipical behavior of a company that drop away
a product in the opensource just because they make no
more profit.
