By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Principal Analyst, Nemertes Research

November 8, 2004

This week’s announcement by CA (NYW: CA) that it is releasing the Ingres R3 database under an open source license spells a new wave of open source adoption and renewed competition in the database market. CA released the Ingres R3 database to the general public under the CA Trusted Open Source License. It can be downloaded at http://ca.com/opensource.

Database servers with enterprise-class abilities are among the last few areas of the data center where open source has not made an impact. While there are several good open source databases, such as MySQL (by MySQL AB) and PostgresSQL, they have been limited to fringe applications, such as running a small, flexible database on a single server. For enterprise-class applications, however, IT executives must select an enterprise-class database server. Although open source databases have been developing sophisticated features for the enterprise market, they do not yet compare with proprietary systems such as those from Oracle (Oracle 9i, 10g and RAC) or IBM (DB2).

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