Re: Is Ingres the wave of the future?

In <CB79C4.6r0_at_nvl.army.mil> bajones_at_sparta (Ebeth Jones) writes:

>Hi -
 

>I have a question that may or may not be appropriate for this group,
>and hopefully will NOT start a major flame war. I have been using
>ORACLE for about 4 years now, as was the rest of our lab up until a
>couple of years ago. At that time, the powers that be in our lab
>decided to switch to Ingres, one reason being that you have more
>visibility into files and more control over them. I suspect that
>another reason was that ya always gotta have something new, whether
>its an improvement or not. Anyway, we are now in the market to upgrade
>or get a new database. My system administrator tells me that I should
>go with Ingres, not only to standardize within our lab, but he says that
>the reason Oracle is so popular is because its been around a long time
>and everyone knows how to use it, not that its necessarily a good
>database, and that he thinks Oracle is on the way out. Opinions?
 

>Elizabeth

Not intended to start a flame-war, eh? We'll see.

I am a long-time Ingres user who happens to be re-evaluating both Ingres and Oracle (hence I am looking at this group), so I can certainly give you the Ingres gospel.

First of all, Oracle and Ingres are both fine systems. Both of them are much improved in the last few years, and neither is as bad as the vendor of the other is always pretending. No matter which one you choose, you will be in good hands. If the switch from Oracle to Ingres is only intended to gratify an appetite for novelty the problem is your management not the software. Off-hand (not being that familiar with Oracle) I can't think of any crippling defects that would warrant dumping a big investment in software, training and expertise. Oracle is NOT on the way out. How silly; where did THAT come from?

Frankly, the "age" of a piece of software is lunatic selection criterion. In any case, Ingres is fractionally OLDER than both DB2 and Oracle if you count University Ingres. Since Relational Technology came to market with the University version practically unchanged I think that's probably fair.

Databases are getting to be more and more of a commodity, they do the same stuff about the same way. Unless you are into big-time OLTP or nationwide distributed databases, I would say almost any engine will do the job. It's the productivity and development tools, and the connectivity aids that should be your selection criteria.

And hey, Ingres isn't the worst thing that could happen to you! :-)

Roy Hann
Senior Analyst, Information Systems
University of Alberta Hospitals rhh_at_tachy.uah.ualberta.ca WMC 2C2.21, 8440-112th Street,

Edmonton, Alberta                          Tel: (403)492-4367
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