This article is an excerpt from a SYS-CON.TV Webcast with Emma McGrattan from Ingres Corporation.

SYS-CON.TV: I'm very pleased to introduce Emma K. McGrattan from Ingres Corporation. Emma is responsible for the development and integration of the Ingres database and associated products and technologies; a leading authority in DBMS and open source technologies, Emma's been instrumental in the ongoing success of the Ingres product line. Born in Ireland, she earned a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Dublin City University.

McGrattan: For those who aren't familiar with Ingres, let me outline where Ingres came from and what the technology is all about.
The Ingres technology has been around for quite some time. It dates back to the early '70s at UC Berkeley, and was a project started by Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, and a number of other very talented folks at Cal Berkeley. They are essentially perceived as the fathers of relational database technology. In the '80s, Ingres went from being an open source project, available under the Berkeley license to anybody who had the money for a source code tape, to a commercial entity, a company called Relational Technology, Inc. The name was later changed to Ingres Corporation. It was thought it was easier to market the product and the company under a single brand. In 1990 it was acquired by a company called ASK Group and in '94 by Computer Associates, so it has had a number of owners over the years. In 2005, we took Ingres out of Computer Associates and set up a company that we also called Ingres Corporation and we're focused on providing support and services around the technology. It's an open source technology, and it's been very well proven in the field. It has over 10,000 customers in 58 countries who, on a daily basis, put the product through its paces in mission-critical and business-critical deployments.

Since then we've been trying to grow a development community around Ingres. We're very focused on the application development community because that's where we traditionally had a very strong presence. People have for decades been building applications to deploy against Ingres and the enterprise, and what they find is that the same Ingres you put on your desktop to build an application will scale all the way up to powering the data servers in the data center.

Up until now we have supported a wide variety of application development environments; now we're focusing on the ones we view as very important and that provide a lot of productivity and preferably are open source solutions that can be developed by the community. There's a lot of passion built up in development communities, and certainly a development community that's targeted at building development tools is ideal. Eclipse is a huge community looking to build an application development environment that allows you to be very productive, to innovate, and to forget about what's happening behind the scenes and focus on what's important, which is developing the business logic code.

Ingres has become a part of the Eclipse community and is looking to join the Eclipse Foundation and to become committers on various Eclipse projects related to database platforms, to modeling, and things of that ilk. Eclipse is a perfect match for Ingres Icebreaker, which is our latest innovation in terms of delivering a database appliance that's a combination of the Ingres database and the R Patch Linux operating system. A single unit, it contains both the operating system components required to support the database and the database itself. The beauty of this is we provide an integrated maintenance stream, so you don't need to think about which operating system patches are a prerequisite for installing database patches, and so on. The entire maintenance stream is integrated and can be automated to a level you're comfortable with.

The following is some background as to what Ingres views as driving the software market dynamics today. Back in the '70s and the early '80s, a lot of companies were building their own data platforms, a lot of companies built their own databases or built data integration technologies that allowed them to serve up the data they needed in the enterprise.

It became very expensive to do this and a lot of companies felt they were undergoing projects that were identical to projects already underway and they were competitors to other companies in their market. A number of database companies sprang up in the '70s and early '80s: Relational Technology, Oracle, Symation, and so on, that focused on delivering relational database solutions. If the customers could free up those resources, which had previously been focused on delivering relational database solutions, to focus on the business, then they were quite willing to pay large sums of money for the technology they were getting back as there was a lot of value in it.

What happened in the mid-'80s through to fairly recent times is that people have felt they were paying ever-increasing prices for database technologies and are not getting the value they perhaps received in the earlier days. They're getting new features that are somewhat niche and perhaps not needed in their business. They're being asked to fund these new developments and perhaps aren't making use of them and certainly don't perceive it as being a good value. This is what's driving the open source movement: people feel they're not getting value for the money they're spending today, which has led them to look at open source solutions where the perception is that what you pay for is what you're using. In the case of Ingres we have no upfront licensing fee for the product; what you pay for is the knowledge or the insurance policy that is essentially a support subscription.

The market will to be driven to equilibrium again and open source is going to drive that.

Figure 1 shows the breakdown of the annual IT budget. At the beginning of the fiscal year, 75-80% of the budget is already spoken for. Typically this is to continue paying license fees for co-source solutions, for support subscriptions, maintenance agreements, and just keeping the currently deployed technology in place. As a result, there's very little money left at the beginning of the year to invest in new projects. This is where we believe we play an important part, because we want to allow you to derive maximum value from the money that you have to spend on innovation. It's a low-cost, high-value platform, and we want to support innovation.

Looking at the money you're spending today for a database, you could probably divide the database world in half. The first half is the database-centric environment. Here the database is the center of the universe but your applications are designed around the capabilities that the database affords. The database really drives the business logic that you can deliver to the business and oftentimes you're paying very high premiums for databases in this type of environment.

There seems to be a bit of resentment about that because the databases are perceived as delivering a lot of value. On the right-hand side of Figure 2 is this second camp, the application-centric world. In this type of database deployment, the application is delivering the value to the business. The database is there to support the application, but it's the application functionality and the business logic it delivers that's important and is at the center of the operations here. Look at your environment; do you fall into a database-centric camp or an application-centric camp? If you're really all about the application, why are you paying such high premiums for the databases that support those applications? How much value are you getting from this and how much innovation is afforded to you in your environment through the use of your database technology?

For Ingres Icebreaker, we've taken a Linux distribution that's provided by a company called R Patch; R Patch Linux is a componentized version of Linux in which they break out the operating system into as many components as they can afford. We've looked through these sets of components and identified the ones that are required to support the database. What you'll find is that you'll have general purpose operating systems. If you look at something such as Windows, even in your desktop environment there are a host of services, user accounts, and technologies that are part of the Windows operating system and you probably don't know what they're for. You probably know how to secure them, and you may have the inconvenience of having to patch them without ever using them.

What the Icebreaker solution does is combine only the operating system components that are required to support Ingres, greatly simplifying deployment. We only have the pieces required by Ingres. We provide a single installed image so what you get is the database and the operating system. There aren't any extraneous user accounts that often compromise the security of the system, no extraneous daemons and services running in the background. There is an integrated maintenance stream, so as you get patches for the environment, the patch will address issues with both the operating system and the database. There aren't separate patch lines for this; it's a single integrated environment.

Icebreaker is a tool for Eclipse users to utilize as the database platform for the Eclipse IDE so as they develop applications, they can focus on what they do best, which is application development, and not have to worry about the installation configuration and maintenance of the databases that might support those applications.

Icebreaker allows you greater freedom to innovate. It's an open source solution that's delivered under the GPL and is perfect for virtualized development environments.

To view the complete Webcast, please go to www2.sys-con.com/webinararchive.cfm?pid=ingresmarch07.