Kill mySQL and Oracle still has open source competition

Oracle buys Sun, ignores any promises it made, and manages to kill mySQL.

It still has open source competition. Serious competition.

The folks over at Ingres have the hardest working PR team in open source. They don't get nearly the love from the media they earn from their hard work.

This post is not designed to make up for that. There is some there there. A four year, $22.3 million contract shared with Freesoft isn't ginormous, but it's not chopped liver.

Enterprise buyers are increasingly desperate to find an alternative to Oracle, and Ingres fits the bill in ways mySQL never really did. As a relative of PostgreSQL it's a "big boy" database, always was, and you get the benefits of corporate support besides.

Much of the nonsense over open source failing as a business model is thanks to a recession that has treated no one kindly. That recession is going to end next year and Ingres is poised for growth.

Ingres has always wanted to be the Red Hat of the open source database market. Is now its time?