Intelligent Enterprise

Ingres, a supplier of the open source relational database released by CA, has teamed up with Red Hat to produce a developer's software stack that substitutes Ingres for the MySQL database, often included in the open source LAMP stack.

It also integrates Ingres with Red Hat's JBoss middleware to generate a more Oracle-like or IBM-like middleware stack for database applications. Applications relying on Ingres could be used for transaction processing systems. Ingres also would provide hot database backup, database partitioning, active or passive high availability, online table restructuring and index reorganization, security auditing, and parallel query execution, all features of Ingres.

In addition to Ingres, the stack includes JBoss Developer Studio tools; JBoss ESB (enterprise service bus) for linking applications to back-end systems and other apps; JBoss Seam, a framework for linking Ajax, Java Server Faces, Enterprise JavaBeans, or standard Java objects to JBoss applications; and JBoss Portal. The stack also taps into the open source Eclipse programmer's workbench.

"We use Eclipse as our integrated development environment," said Deb Woods, VP of product management for Ingres.

"An Ingres dialect has been added to the JBoss tools, saving half a day's effort to download and get started integrating the two together," added Woods.

Using the stack will let developers avoid leaning on stored procedures or triggers written in a vendor's proprietary form of Structured Query Language and instead "put the SQL at the application server level," where it can be more easily accessed and modified, or moved to a different database system, Woods said in an interview.

The stack is available at Ingres' Web site, where it's listed as the Ingres Stack for JBoss and is available for free download and use for 90 days. At the end of 90 days, technical support for a developer user is $500. Production pricing is $7,995 per CPU for instances of production systems based on the stack. A two-way server with four cores per CPU would be two times $7,995, for example.

Ingres and Red Hat spokesmen say three enterprise customers are now using the stack to deploy their mission-critical applications. Biveroni Batschelet Partners, Allied Express, and Connected Weddings say they use the stack with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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