OSCON Update
July 27th, 2007
I’m writing this on the flight back to New York after a very successful OSCON in which we saw a lot of traffic on the Ingres booth, met with a lot of passionate open source community members and caught up with other members of the Open Solutions Alliance. The Ingres marketing team did an outstanding job of promoting my “Databases Don’t Matter” session and managed to pack the room to capacity. There were representatives of the Ingres, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Derby communities in the audience and we had a lively and interesting discussion on the topic of databases, contrasting the functionality that the open source databases provide and identifying their respective sweet spots. The general consensus was that databases are essential components of the IT infrastructure but that the ideal database should be invisible, available, reliable and maintenance free. The parallel I drew was to plumbing, where you don’t want to see it, hear it, or think about it, but it should always be available and should always just work. One of the audience members mentioned the fact that he was running PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle in his environment so I asked him about his decision making process when selecting which database was most appropriate for a particular application. I found it amusing when he said that he used MySQL for “data that didn’t matter”, so I polled the MySQL users in the audience to see how many of them were using MySQL similarly and it came as quite a shock to realize that all but one of the MySQL users are using it for “data that doesn’t matter”. Given our proven track record in mission critical deployments I believe that there’s a tremendous opportunity for us to introduce the MySQL community to an open source database solution for the data that really matters. The audience seemed genuinely interested in learning more about Ingres and I hope that they take me up on my invitation to download Ingres from our community web site.
