Ingres II Open Source RDBMS

If a DBA were to select a database management system about a decade ago, he

had very few vendors to choose from. There was Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL

Server. But before

 Sybase or even SQL Server came into existence as an industry scale

relational database management systems, there was Ingres that had established

itself as an RDBMS. Ingres can be rightly termed as the 'granddaddy' of all the

relational databases as it has been a well-known name in the database business

for long, and now it is available as open source. Ingres is a high performance

and highly scalable database systems, which also has features for higher

availability, backup capability and higher level of security that matches the

best of any other open source database product.

In this article we'll look at how Ingres has progressed from a funded

research project to an enterprise-class database system, and also a hands-on

experience with this database system and its gmt functionalities.

Ingres history and benefits



"INteractive Graphics and REtrieval System," Ingres was a research project at
University of California, Berkeley, started in early 1970s for a relational

database research. The Ingres source code was available at a modest fee and

several companies use the Ingres source code to build products. The core Ingres

code not only forms the base of Ingres Database, but also forms the foundation

of several other industry-leading RDBMS systems as well, like PostgreSql. Two

scientists, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, who worked on this relational

database research project, founded a company named Relational Technology Inc in

1980 to market Ingres products. The company converted the Ingres code to

incorporate various front-end tools for creating and manipulating the databases.

They also started introducing application development tools and distributed

database concepts with Ingres. This was the time when Ingres leaded Oracle in

the industry database system. Ingres had been one of the first database systems

to introduce advanced features like triggers and stored procedures. While Oracle

was concentrated toward SQL compatibility, Ingres stuck to the Quel support from

the Ingres research project. This could be attributed as a drawback for the

decline in Ingres market as customers favored Oracle over Ingres. Though Oracle

was backed by better marketing, Ingres lacked that and as a result it wasn't

well known in the industry. Then in 1994 the company was taken over by Computer

Associates who offered Ingres under various brands like OpenIngres and Ingres

II. The first open source database of Ingres product-line was released in 2004

and Ingres Corporation was formed as company by Computer Associates that would

take care of the support services for the open source products. Ingres

Corporation released Ingres 2006 under GNU General Public License in 2006.

Ingres Visual Manager indicates which components have been started (marked green) and also displays the log of activities

Being open source, it is the only database system that is regarded as an

enterprise class database solution having features of better management and

performance. Ingres maintains the data integrity by method of transactional journaling and thus offers better

data recovery and backup facilities. Scalability is always an attribute that

organizations look for while opting for a database solution, Ingres provides

higher scalability option as it supports multiple levels of sub-partitions to

tables, so as to give user flexibility in designing tables to match their usage

criterion. Ingres supports various operating platforms so it can be deployed in

most of the development and production environments. Ingres supports development

with many different programming languages like Java, C++, PHP, .NET, Ruby,

Python etc. to develop applications that can leverage Ingres as a database. The

installation of the Ingres solution is also a quick and easy process compared to

that of other leading RDBMS solutions. And with tools for administering and

application development, one can pretty much get all the features from this open

source database solution which highly priced solutions like Oracle and MS

SqlServer have to offer.

On clicking 'Add Object', a database under a server can be added. Create Database window also has option of creating distributed database

Getting Started



With this month's PCQ Professional DVD we bring you Ingres II 2006, which can be
used to install Ingres database system on a Windows platform. As we mentioned

that installing Ingres is a simple process, you just have to extract the content

of the zipped file to a directory and execute/run the setup.exe file. With this

the .NET Data Provider for Ingres as well as the documentation files for Ingres

gets installed along with the Ingres Database and administering tools. Once the

installation process gets completed, the Ingres Visual Manager and the Ingres

system-tray icon appear on the screen. Using the system tray icon the Ingres

Visual Manager can also be started later on. The Visual Manager shows the

various components of the instance are started or not. The Ingres database

process can be started by right-clicking on the Ingres Installation root node

and then selecting the Start option. Even when you wish to stop the server

instance, you can use Visual Manager to stop the database server.

Performance Monitor tool can help you see the information about the system as well as the database sessions, logs and locks information

Database Administration



Ingres provides visual interface tool for database creation and administration
called as Ingres Visual DBA. You can start the Visual DBA by using the

system-tray icon. When you navigate through the nodes tree to the Ingres server,

you can connect to the database server and then on the right panel you can see

the Database Object Manager window. The Database Manger window also provides

nodes whereby we can create profiles, users as well as roles for the users

through this interface. To create a database we click on the Add Object button,

or by right-clicking on the database node we can add a new database. On 'create

new database' window, we can give name of the database as well as we can select

the option of creating a distributed databases and from the Location tab, we can

specify the location of the database. Similarly, to create tables for a

database, just expand the node of that particular database name. And from under

the table's node, we can select Add Object button to add a new table under that

database.

For administration, Ingres has some utility tools like Ingres Performance

Monitor, which can be used to monitor system-related or performance information

in the Performance Monitor window. With this system NameServer, Network info and

database locks, and information pertaining to sessions can be monitored.

In Conclusion



Ingres being an open source RDBMS is a strong database that has features as well
as performance capability to match the leading industry database systems like

Oracle and MS SqlServer. But it remains to be seen how much community work can

propel this open source database to the heights and popularity of that achieved

by MySQL.