Ingres (database)


Ingres Database is a proprietary SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications.
In its early years, Ingres was an important milestone in the history of database development. Ingres began as a research project at UC Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in 1985. During this time Ingres remained largely similar to IBM's seminal System R in concept; it differed in more permissive licensing of source code, in being based largely on DEC machines, both under
UNIX and VAX/VMS, and in providing QUEL as a query language instead of SQL. QUEL was considered at the time to run truer to Edgar F. Codd's relational algebra, but SQL was easier to parse and less intimidating for those without a formal background in mathematics.
When ANSI preferred SQL over QUEL as part of the 1986 SQL standard, Ingres became less competitive against rival products such as Oracle until future Ingres versions also provided SQL. Many companies spun off of the original Ingres technology, including Actian itself, originally known as Relational Technology Inc., and the NonStop SQL database originally developed by Tandem Computers but now offered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

History

Ingres began as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in 1985. The original code, like that from other projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a permissive license. Ingres spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop SQL and a number of others.
Postgres, a project which started in the mid-1980s, later evolved into PostgreSQL. It is ACID compatible and is fully transactional and is part of the Lisog open-source stack initiative.

1970s

In 1973 when the System R project led by Edgar Codd was getting started at IBM, the research team released a series of papers describing the system they were building. Two scientists at Berkeley, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, became interested in the concept after reading the papers, and started a relational database research project of their own.
They had already raised money for researching a geographic database system for Berkeley's economics group, which they called Ingres, for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System. They decided to use this money to fund their relational project instead, and used this as a seed for a new and much larger project. They decided to re-use the original project name, and the new project became University INGRES. For further funding, Stonebraker approached the DARPA, the obvious funding source for computing research and development at the time, but both the DARPA and the Office of Naval Research turned them down as they were already funding database research elsewhere. Stonebraker then introduced his idea to other agencies, and, with help from his colleagues he eventually obtained modest support from the NSF and three military agencies: the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the Naval Electronic Systems Command.
Thus funded, Ingres was developed during the mid-1970s by a rotating team of students and staff. Ingres went through an evolution similar to that of IBM System R, with an early prototype in 1974 followed by major revisions to make the code maintainable. Ingres was then disseminated to a small user community, and project members rewrote the prototype repeatedly to incorporate accumulated experience, feedback from users, and new ideas. The research project ended in 1985.

Commercialization (1980s)

Ingres remained largely similar to IBM's System R in concept, but it was based largely on DEC machines running
Unix. Unlike System R, Ingres benefited from Unix's growing popularity and was available for free; source code was available for a nominal fee. By 1980 some 1,000 copies had been distributed, primarily to universities. Many students from Berkeley and other universities who used the Ingres source code worked on various commercial database software systems.
Many asked when Ingres would become a commercial product. After hearing that Larry Ellison was comparing the Oracle Database to Ingres, the project formed a commercial company, borrowed university computers in exchange for a free license, and ported the database from Unix to VAX VMS. The first product release occurred in early 1981; among the customers were DEC and Schlumberger. Demand for the VMS version was so much stronger than on Unix that the company neglected the latter and had to port the software back to it.
Berkeley students Jerry Held and later Karel Youseffi moved to Tandem Computers, where they built a database system that evolved into NonStop SQL. The Tandem database system was a re-implementation of the Ingres technology. It evolved into a system that ran effectively on parallel computers; that is, it included functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions. Components of the system were first released in the late 1970s. By 1989, the system could run queries in parallel and the product became fairly famous for being one of the few systems that scales almost linearly with the number of processors in the machine: adding a second CPU to an existing NonStop SQL server will almost exactly double its performance. Tandem was later purchased by Compaq, which started a re-write in 2000, and now the product is at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
In the early 1980s, Ingres competed head-to-head with Oracle, but IBM's endorsement of SQL benefited Oracle. The two products were widely regarded as the leading hardware-independent relational database implementations; they had comparable functionality, performance, market share, and pricing, and many commentators considered Ingres to be a superior product. From around 1985, however, Ingres steadily lost market share. One reason was Oracle's aggressive marketing; another was the increasing recognition of SQL as the preferred relational query language. Ingres originally had provided a different language, QUEL, and the conversion to SQL took about three years, losing valuable time in the race.
Robert Epstein, the chief programmer on the project while he was at Berkeley, formed Britton Lee, Inc. along with other students from the Ingres Project, Paula Hawthorn and Michael Ubell; they were joined later by Eric Allman. Later, Epstein founded Sybase. Sybase had been the #2 product for some time through the 1980s and into the 1990s, before Informix came "out of nowhere" and took over in 1997. Sybase's product line had also been licensed to Microsoft in 1992, who rebranded it as Microsoft SQL Server. This relationship soured in the late 1990s, and today SQL Server outsells Sybase by a wide margin.

Relational Technologies, Inc. (RTI)

Several companies used the Ingres source code to produce products. The most successful was a company named Relational Technology, Inc., founded in 1980 by Stonebraker and Wong, and another Berkeley professor, Lawrence A. Rowe. RTI was renamed Ingres Corporation in the late 1980s. The company ported the code to DEC VAX/VMS, which was the commercial operating system for DEC VAX computers. They also developed a collection of front-end tools for creating and manipulating databases and application development tools. Over time, much of the source was rewritten to add functionality and improve performance.
Project Jewel was an early prototype of abstract data types. Ingres was the first database to be certified as a "Rainbow Book" B2 certified database, as such it was adopted by the US National Laboratories for storage for the design of nuclear weapons. It was also deployed by the CIA. Support needs for highly classified air gapped systems led to the creation of an Expert System for problem resolution hosted on the DARPA network.
After DEC withdrew from a planned investment in Ingres, the company was purchased by ASK Corporation in November 1990. The founders left the company over the next several months.

Computer Associates

In 1994, ASK/Ingres was purchased by Computer Associates.
In February 2000, Computer Associates announced the general availability of Ingres II 2.0 for Linux. Besides the components found in the SDK, the full edition contains more modules, such as:
  • Net: this component makes possible for Ingres utilities and user applications to access databases residing on different installations.
  • Replicator: support for replication functions.
  • Star: for handling distributed databases.
  • Enterprise Access: communication with different database management systems and other, non-relational data sources.
  • Protocol Bridge: for communicating with clients on different types of networks.
  • Spatial Object Library: for handling two-dimensional spatial objects.
Ingres versions 6.4 and Ingres II have long been a commonly used database management system, mainly in data center operations at universities and other public bodies. For a while, it was still able to resist Oracle's dominance due to low licensing costs.
In addition to the low license fees, Ingres II had the advantage of lower resource requirements over Oracle, for example, which is why it could also be used on smaller machines. Disadvantages were the more difficult usability, the lower number of platforms on which this system ran and fewer Ingres-capable applications.
On the grounds that the performance of Ingres was comparable to that of other large DBMSes, Computer Associates raised the license fees sharply, thereby losing a key advantage over Oracle. Insufficient marketing by Computer Associates and the resulting lack of sales as well as a lack of IT technicians who master this system and who could be called on when necessary were partly responsible for a decline in marketshare. As a result, Ingres installations were increasingly replaced by Oracle implementations.
In 2004, Computer Associates released Ingres R3 under CA Trusted Open Source License, an open source license. The code includes the DBMS server and utilities and the character-based front-end and application-development tools. In essence, it shipped everything except OpenROAD, the Windows 4GL GUI-based development environment.