Ingres 9.2 Offered With Ease Of Use EnhancementsIngres 9.2 Offered With Ease Of Use Enhancements

Software provider Ingres this week made available Ingres Database 9.2, an open source database with improved reliability and ease of administration.

Release 9.2 was made available Nov. 18 for free download from the company's download site. Upgrading from previous releases is a simplified and automated task that doesn't require reloading the data in the system, Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt said. The release is being offered about a year after the announcement of 9.1.

Release 9.2 has expanded Unicode support, which allows it to be used and supported in 20 languages. It's added point-in-time restore features and enhancements to its ability to be backed up online, Burkhardt said in a prepared statement on the release.

Support for both Java Database Connectivity and Microsoft's .Net Data Provider has been updated. It supports application development through the Eclipse open source programmer's workbench and its tool plug-ins. And it directly supports application develop in PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, and .Net, Burkhardt said.

Ingres is more than two decades old and is considered a highly reliable online transaction processing system, with mature SQL language support and reliability features. Ingres was the original competitor to Oracle, based on research conducted at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s. It was acquired by Ask Computer, then Computer Associates International, then released as open source code by CA in 2005. It's now a product of Ingres Corp., distributed under the GPLv2 license, with 10,000 customers worldwide.

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