First at all, let me present myself. I'm working with Ingres since 14 years now, first as a DBA on different Ingres customer in France (L'Oreal, SONY, FNAC) and those last 7 years as an Ingres Senior Consultant for CA France. I visit here about more than 100 sites, major of those customers where big production site (CA customer is on fortune off 500 enterprises).
Since last June I left CA to create my own company (La Fage Conseil) and the activity of my company is Ingres expertise.
* Bigger history database
Ingres exist in his commercial version since 1974. What other DB can say that ? none ... It mean a very strong expertise from people who work for Ingres in the corp company. Some of them are here from the beggining, and many people (developpers or customers) love this DB and did not follow the now old fashion to swap Ingres with Oracle. From my point of view it is a very important advantage to drain this knowledge history for a product like a database ...
* Enterprise class database ...
Ingres and Oracle play in the same area : enterprise database. Ingres is not comparable to MySQL or SQL Server (even if those two DB want to play the same game than Oracle or Ingres, their functionality are too new).
* Functionality
In term on functionality Ingres and Oracle are pretty similar. It was not true in the past but the recent history of Ingres tell us the product have a better approach of the functionality the customers ask and need. Everything (or near) you can to with Oracle you can do with Ingres.
* Cross platform
Ingres is cross platform : windows, UNIX, linux, Z/os, VMS, and it is not only a marketing announce. The data and applications hosted in Ingres (ABF or OpenROAD) can migrate easily from a platform to an other (I made many migration from an UNIX to an other, from an old version of Ingres to the last one, changing sometimes the OS and the Ingres version with no major problems).
* Price cost
In term of pricing Ingres is more interesting than Oracle. First you can use de DB for free (GPL2 License) and even if you want to buy support on Ingres Ingres Corp is cheaper than Oracle. Because Ingres license fee is about real processor pricing. For example with Oracle if your hardware host a dual core processor you paid the price for two processor, with Ingres you pay for only one processor. If your Oracle is hosted in VMWare you pay for each VMWare processor. With Ingres, you pay only the price for the real processors. At least you can deal with Ingres Involve Partners (like my company) and then the price is lower again (15 percent cut off from the corporate price).
* DBA Cost
With Ingres you need less DBA time than Oracle. A famous french customer have 3 Oracle DBA to manage 10 database and 1 Ingres DBA at half time to manage 80 databases (40 HP with 2 ingres database on each).
* High avaibility
My own experience (gained from my 100 Ingres customers) say another intersting thing. When Oracle go down, you must wait for a half day or more to have the DB on line again. With Ingres, it takes only minutes (from real experience of software stack that could not be rewrited on Oracle for the avaibility reason). With Ingres you have also many high avaibility options : federated databases, replication, clustering (active-active, active-passive).
* Easy to install
Ingres take less than 15 minutes to install on many platforms (windows, linux, unix) and the default configuration is able to answer the majority of production needs. Everything or near is customizable and administration is quite easy.
* Easy to work with
Ingres can deal with many environments : ODBC of course, but also JDBC, PHP, Perl, Python, etc.
* Future
Ingres is an open source product since 2004, and an independant company since 2005 (before that it was a CA product). New versions are provided by the Ingres Corp and new intersting concepts like IceBreaker are launched by Ingres Corp. They intend to take the market, and it is very exciting to deal with a reactive company, with a positive strategy ...
I hope this answer your question (and I hope my english is not too bad :-))
Please can I ask one now ? For what business your question is ? You can reply me via AllExperts or use my email : jpzuate@gmail.com
