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Ingres has updated its flagship database with new migration, performance and security capabilities in the hopes of winning users over from its competitors.
Migration is a key focus of the enhancements in Ingres Database 10, starting with multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) that the company said provides concurrent access to the database.
“This feature greatly improves the throughput in highly concurrent environments,” said Roger Burkhardt, CEO of Ingres. “We designed the specifics of our MVCC implementation to ease migration and believe that application migrations will be much more straightforward as well as generate higher performance applications.”
Ingres 10 also introduces new SQL functions such as IFNULL, GREATER, LESSER and the new BOOLEAN data-type that users have encountered in migrating applications to Ingres. In the past, the company has had to “code around” the absence of those features, Burkhardt told eWEEK.
“We’ve also added support for JDBC 4.0, again to simplify the migration process … [and] invested in a state-of-the-art set of migration tools with a simple-to-use graphical user interface to ease migration from databases such as Oracle, MySQL and [Microsoft] SQL Server,” he said.
Part of the company’s strategy is to compete with pricing. Recently announced plans by Oracle to eliminate the Basic and Silver support options for MySQL customers in favor of multiyear agreements create an opportunity, the CEO said.
“Our investments in Ingres 10 and state-of-the-art migration tools were made to address the needs of these partners who want an easy, low-risk migration from Oracle,” Burkhardt said.
The price for Ingres 10 is the same as for the previous version.
In the areas of performance and security, Ingres has added batch query execution, bulk loading and column encryption. According to Burkhardt, the company is seeing demand from two areas-department and midmarket companies dealing with issues around data warehousing as well as companies that sell information as a business, such as e-commerce analytic companies.
“Ingres continues to focus on supporting its new migration customers and strong community of relational database customers with new features and innovation,” he said. “At the same time, the company is breaking into the analytic database market with its Ingres VectorWise product, which launched in June of this year. We see this as a huge opportunity considering the feedback we’ve received already about price, performance and ease of deployment.”