Ingres 9.3 debuts today with an increased focused on migration from other database solutions. With the Oracle takeover of MySQL, we are seeing a number of customers that are looking for other options to avoid vendor lock in and the uncertainly  about the future of MySQL. Several members of the community have been working with the Ingres staff on building tools/ scripts for migrating to Ingres. If you have some ideas and would like to contribute in this area please let us know.  The Ingres community wiki has a number of ways to get involved with and the team is always looking to welcome new users.

Ingres 9.3 has implemented a number of key features that will help assist application developers with the migration. Ingres 9.3 offers support for:

• Like for Long Objects to facilitate porting FOSS applications
• Identity columns
• Named results
• Extended .Net support
• One click configuration support for common workloads
• Liferay application support
• Support for table procedures

This isn’t a complete list of features that will aid developers in the seamless migration from other databases but is a good sampling to pique interest. The full list can be found on the Ingres products page.  There is a webinar that walks through the various features with Christine Normile, Sr. Product Mgr for Ingres listed on the Ingres On Demand Webinar site.

If you are new to Ingres there also is a great selection of on demand webinars to help you get started. Topics includes Getting started with Ingres, Ingres for Oracle users, How to manage Ingres, How to backup your data and How to import your data are just a sampling to get you started.

Check out the download and let us know what you think.

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I’ve been involved in open source for over a decade now and all I can say is nothing ever surprises me anymore. When I saw the announcement this week for the Open Database Alliance, I had to think – wassup? Looks like there are loads of users, customers, partners, contributors and who knows who else is not happy with the recent Oracle acquisition of MySQL. Now we have MariaDB, which is really MySQL with a little extra goodness added in for those that don’t want support from Oracle. That is the beauty of open source.

I do find it sort of interesting that MariaDB is doing the same thing to MySQL/ Oracle that Oracle did to Red Hat a few years ago. MariaDB is basically taking MySQL and adding their fixes and additional functionality and releasing to the market at MariaDB. No harm no foul. Oracle does the same thing, they take Red Hat Enterprise Linux, add their own fixes, couple unique patches just for Oracle and then releases it as Oracle Linux.

Oh well,I guess it all works out in the wash. But now come the questions – and trust me, there are alot. What happens to all the customers and partners that depend on MySQL? How do you know which version to use MariaDB vs MySQL, Which storage engine  do I use Maria, PBXT, Innodb, MyISAM, Falcom, Percona XtraDB,  etc?   How do I know if all the features I need will be included in future versions. I’ll stop there. It’s always sad to see a community reach the point that they split. Sounds like a lot of confusion and uncertainty for their community.

We at Ingres have been most fortunate in this area. The code has been together with out a fork for over 30 years and has over 10k commercial customers.  With a support team that has an average tenure of 12+ years and a customer satisfaction rating over 90%, we know what it means to support enterprises with business critical needs. True, we don’t have the same mindshare as MySQL, but we do have a great set of loyal customers, partners and community members. Today is the day we remember how important it is to stand together and listen to the needs of each other.

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