Recently, IBM announced the open-sourcing of their Cloudscape database. a lightweight, Java-based relational database with a footprint of just 2MB. It’s significantly less resource-intensive than enterprise databases like IBM’s DB2. Its target use is to underpin small Web sites, point-of-sale systems and departmental-level or small-business applications.
As was read in this article IBM Open-Sources Cloudscape Database, Cloudscape is handed over to the Apache Software Foundation. Apache is renaming the 2-MB database “Derby” and will make the software available as a free, open-source product. See Derby at Apache. Derby is not yet available for download – it should be somewhere in September 2004, but the source are available (and from them you can build Derby).
On July 19th 2004, this article – Comeback: CA Goes Open Source With Ingres Database – described Computer Associates’ move to hand over Ingres to the open source community. Remarkably, one of the key officials at CA behind this move is Mark Barrenechea, senior VP of product development for CA, who has a long history as (S)VP at Oracle.
Ingres is already available for download, see Ingres Home at CA. The release enables the open source community to review and submit modifications to the Ingres r3 code line for possible inclusion in the general availability version, scheduled for September 30, 2004. An interesting article on the subject Ingres open source database on the rise notes: CA is releasing the Ingres code under its CA Trusted Open Source License. Under the license, CA retains ownership of the code and could take the code back in the future. ngres’ maturity gives it an advantage over MySQL and other open source DBMSes. Unicode data support, table partitioning, parallel query, online table reorganization, triggers, bi-directional replication, automatic space management and program language precompilers are key features in Ingres that are not commonly found in other open source databases.
This article – CA, IBM Open-Source Moves Not Equal – goes into the differences in the moves by IBM and Ingres. In short: “IBM is giving up Cloudscape because it wants to encourage more development of Java-based applications. CA, on the other hand, is hoping to harness the power of thousands of open-source developers to breathe new life into its moribund database technology.” The article does not expect to much from Ingres in the open source domain, given CA’s reluctance to really release control: “SAP’s experience with SAPDB already has shown us that the open-source community can’t be pushed or bribed into embracing a technology it doesn’t need.”
You’ll find that Ingres has had substantial investment and been spun out of CA as a separate company with a dual license model that supports GPL and commercial licenses.
Learn more at http://www.ingres.com and visit the community site at http://community.ingres.com where you’ll find our community forums, downloads, wiki and a link to our technical blog at http://blogs.ingres.com/tech
In the “Eclipse Tips” of the first of September, this news can be found too, as well as a plug-in for Eclipse: