Expert: Jean-Pierre Zuate - 9/29/2008

Question
QUESTION: I want to use Ingres for my startup and want to integrate it with .NET 2.0. I want to know how the integration works. the version 2006 is free or not.

ANSWER: Hello,

Normaly it works. Please have a look at Ingres official documentation here : http://docs.ingres.com/qs-windows/ConnectingtoIngresfromNET

Concerning Ingres 2006 and open source, there is 2 versions of Ingres 2006 : one named enterprise, the other one named community.

The enterprise one MUST be used with a SUPPORT CONTRACT.
The community  one is free of charge, but without support (look for help from community).

Hope this clear and help you.

Regards,
Jean-Pierre ZUATE
http://lafageconseil.fr

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: How Ingres rates in terms of performance, stability and scalability when compared to MySQL and PostgreSQL.

ANSWER: Hello,

Short question, big answer needed. Sorry but mine will be short ;-)

First, you must compare the history of those products before trying to evaluate performance or stabitlity. Ingres, MySQL, PostgreSQL are all open source project. PostgreSQL and Ingres are brothers, MySQL is a pure open source project (i mean a community project). Ingres is the only one with an entreprise experience.

I know many "toochy" system all around the world based on Ingres. If you dig deep on the www.ingres.com or UK user group website i am sure you will find thoses examples. All of them are well cooked, running quietly on a regular maneer, working with often a large amount of users and data update.

I suppose it exist example about MySQL and PostgreSQL, with many users, but I think many of them are only website oriented. I mean not with a large transactional behavior. As far as I know both MySQL and PostgreSQL have transaction (for example) but thise kind functionnality come late in those products (in the last 6 or 7 years) when it come from the begging of Ingres (80's). The other "intersting" functionality like this are distributed database, replication, etc.

Concerning scalability it depend on the modelisation and conception process. It is not technical dependant. However, Ingres is very scalable.

Stability depend, like on many software, of the stability of the environment. But it is true to say for production use, with Ingres, you often need a patch (because your DBMS crash for particular querys, difficult to isolate, or to correct).

Performance is dependant of the modelisation and hardware. Ingres have many structures (heap, hash, btree, isam) that allow different kind of access. Here again ingres corp website and ingres uk website are full of powerpoints on the subject.

Please do not fall in the deep hole of MySQL performance tests. They are not intended to represent an exhaustive test for all RDBMS. It is a good test for MySQL ... only. Some experts say it did not reprensent the true life of applications. I personaly think performances depend on the database design, that alway must be adapted to the technology (whatever the one you use : mysql, postgresql, ingres, oracle, and so on).

Hope this help you.

Regards,
Jean-Pierre

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Jean,

When Ingres is the father of RDBMS, why it is still jumping from hand to hand? MySQL support and infrastructure is excellent. Their products look commercial. Whereas, both PostgreSQL and Ingres look like cheap products. I have not seen any busy, well-managed forum to get help with Ingres.

Answer
Hello,

Has I say in my previous post, Ingres is not a pure community product.

Why Ingres is jumping from hand to hand ?
Because it was a commercial product, company sell their code and portfollio. Depend on the period, for example from Ask Ingres to Computer Associates (in 1995) a "legend" say Ask Ingres lost a lawsuit and the amount of the lawsuit was exactly the price of the RDBMS ...

No forums well managed
They are some. See http://community.ingres.com But do not hope to have the same buzz than MySQL or PostgreSQL with Ingres. Just because this product is very very new in the open source area, community is a long stuff to build (and as far as I know Ingres team do things well).

Hope this help,
Jean-Pierre