Computer Associates International, Inc. today announced the availability of Ingres r3 under the CA Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL). The release enables the open source community to review and submit modifications to the Ingres r3 code line for possible inclusion in the general availability version, scheduled for September 30, 2004.

This marks the first time a major enterprise software vendor has collaborated directly with the open source community to deliver enterprise-class database technology.

CATOSL is a derivative of the common public license that is available from http://opensource.org and is Open Source Initiative (OSI) compliant. Software developers can incorporate Ingres into their own solutions as long as the Ingres source code is made available in accordance with CATOSL. CA will provide support for Ingres r3, including indemnification, as an added cost option.

Developers and other parties can download Ingres r3 today at http://ca.com/opensource. This site also provides technical and support information for Ingres and CA’s other open source projects. Contributors can submit their modifications to the project at this site.

”Ingres r3 has exceeded our expectations throughout the beta testing – providing powerful new functionality on the Linux platform while preserving our existing application investments,” said Shaf Rahman, group technical director at ICLP, a global marketing services agency with offices in seven countries. “The innovation that CA is fostering with the open source community will take Ingres to new heights, creating an even more sophisticated, powerful and adaptable open source database.”

Ingres r3 is a powerful, proven database platform that offers customers superlative performance, scalability and manageability. New features include:

  • High Availability Clusters for maintaining uninterrupted performance in the event of a failure of one database or server node within a cluster configuration.
  • Scalable Database Clusters that enable customers to use Linux and commodity hardware to achieve 24×7×365 availability with unmatched economy.
  • Table partitioning and indexing designed to meet the demands of Very Large Database implementations.
  • Parallel query processing, which provides unrivaled scalability by dividing individual queries into components that can be executed in parallel across all available resources.
  • On-line table and index reorganization, which supports 24×7 availability by allowing database table maintenance to be performed while the database remains online and in production.
  • The ability to fully exploit 64-bit environments – including improved query execution, addressability of 64-bit file systems and 64-bit database cache enablement.
  • Comprehensive support for global business data sources under Unicode, a uniform, fixed-width, encoded character set.

Ingres can seamlessly integrate with other applications and data in a heterogeneous environment. This is of particular significance as Linux becomes more prevalent in enterprise IT environments and can become important in the event of a business merger or acquisition. Its ease-of-integration also allows it to be used with a wide range of application development tools. Ingres is especially well suited for embedded applications, thanks to industry-standard connectivity options that allow developers to work within a J2EE framework, a .NET environment or both.

CA Technology Services is offering a wide range of customizable education courses and services, both on-site and remote, to help customers take advantage of Ingres r3.

“The tens of thousands of customers who depend on Ingres technology to run their business can now leverage the vast resources of the open source development community as well as CA’s own R&D,” said Tony Gaughan, senior vice president of development at CA. “Releasing Ingres into open source underscores CA’s vision to embrace the open source paradigm to best serve the interests of our customers.”

This release fulfills CA’s commitment at caworld 2004 in May to deliver Ingres to the community under CATOSL within 90 days. Ingres r3 will also be available on Windows, UNIX and OpenVMS.