Oracle News Desk

Ingres Corporation announced the availability of Ingres Database 9.3, the latest version of the company’s flagship open source database product. Ingres Database 9.3 offers easy migration from MySQL, as well as from proprietary databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase. Ingres Database 9.3 boasts a number of key features to help java application developers be more productive and is specifically designed to help meet the demands of a rapidly growing partner community with Liferay certification. Ingres Database 9.3 also highlights the importance community contributions play in the innovation of open source software by including features to the database engine that were added by its community members.

“As the fate of MySQL is currently in the hands of the European Commission, open source community developers and our global business customers and partners are seeking a more stable, reliable open source database,” said Deb Woods, vice president of product management, Ingres. “Ingres Database 9.3 is designed to meet their needs with an easy migration path to Ingres and we encourage anyone looking for an alternative to consider migration today.”

Easy Migration to Ingres

Ingres Database 9.3 also provides easy migration for business critical workloads from proprietary databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase. Ingres prides itself on support for open standards, but has seen a de-facto standard emerge alongside the industry standard SQL, and in this release Ingres adds features commonly used in applications written for MySQL and Oracle to enable a smooth migration to Ingres. These features include improved accessibility of table procedures from within the query and the support of positional parameter notations that makes database procedure invocation more flexible.

“We have just executed a successful migration from both a Microsoft SQL Server and an Oracle database to an integrated Ingres solution for a client in the healthcare sector running our VIP-application. We had less than three months from the start of the project to our go live date. We met this goal and all systems are now running smoothly and robustly,” said Ralf Kipper, managing director, VEGA Software GmbH. “For our clients, being able to run this application centrally on one database has many benefits – for example, a significant cost reduction due to the open source business model, as well far less administration needed because we are working with proven Ingres technology.”

Ingres Database 9.3 also provides support for pluggable authentication modules (PAM) which enables the database to support more authentication mechanisms than previous versions. PAM also makes it easier to support one program that supports multiple security services than the various operating-specific users’ authentication schemes. PAM also provides lower security exposure because the authorization program can run either with no special privileges or with shadow group privileges.

Partner-Enablement and Liferay Support

Ingres Database 9.3 is certified on Liferay, a leading open source portal and social collaboration solution. The Liferay portal is easy to customize and handles large organizational structures, such as giving each business unit a unique look and security permissions.

“Rivet Logic applauds the feature enhancements in Ingres Database 9.3 that put a laser focus on the application developer,” said Mike Vertal, president and CEO, Rivet Logic. “Large object support (lobs), long name support, as well as support for the Liferay portal are key for us in further enhancing our work with Alfresco, JBoss, and Liferay solutions. Our consulting services and solutions enable our clients to streamline operations, enhance partner and supplier relations, build social communities, and improve customer loyalty by enabling self-service capabilities. Ingres Database 9.3 gives us the necessary edge to meet these goals.”

New and Enhanced Application Development Tools

Ingres continues to support the latest standards including open database connectivity (ODBC), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), and .Net Data Provider. Ingres Database 9.3 adds the ability to automatically start multiple Data Access Servers to improve scalability in environments where large numbers of .Net and JDBC applications are connecting to Ingres. In addition, Ingres Database 9.3 simplifies the setup of JDBC driver properties with the addition of the Ingres JDBC Driver Properties Generator. The utility runs automatically during installation but can also be run at any time.

“The added functionality in Ingres Database 9.3 makes writing java applications easier,” said Fima Katz, CEO, Exadel. “Just recently, we worked with Ingres on ways in which developers and ISVs can use open source and the cloud to write java applications with Ingres, JBoss, and Red Hat Linux as a way to drive down deployment costs. As a leading provider of professional services for developing customized Web 2.0 applications for our clients, we are pleased to put our support behind Ingres Database 9.3 and look forward to taking advantage of the improved functionality.”

Innovative Community Contributions

Ingres Database 9.3 is also the result of powerful open source community contributions from around the world.

“Unlike other open source database technologies, Ingres doesn’t lock out outside contributions that truly enhance the product,” said Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering, Ingres. “We encourage outside community developers to participate – all great ideas for new database features are welcome and many of the suggestions we’ve received in the last year are part of Ingres Database 9.3.”

For example, Roy Hann of Rational Commerce and chair of the UK Ingres Users Association offered contributions to Ingres Database 9.3. During the “UK Code Sprint” last year, Hann developed 32-bit and 64-bit unordered sequences which are useful for applications that use the sequences to generate value for a B-tree indexed column which can expand gracefully, without the overhead associated with continually adding entries at the end of the value range.

In addition, Ronald Jeninga of IndependIT Integrative Technologies GmbH contributed source code changes to make Ingres running on various flavors of UNIX/LINUX platforms PAM aware. PAM provides applications greater flexibility to use different security services without re-compilation of the application itself, providing a single API for the application. A system administrator can then reconfigure PAM to access shadow passwords or any of various supported security mechanisms without having to change or recompile the application.