Having awakened from a 15-year slumber as a newly spun-off open source database a couple years back, Ingres is getting ready for its next act as it pursues niches in content management and BI.

Among the highlights, it has announced that it has been certified by and signed a reseller deal with Alfresco, an open source content management provider (open source BPM provider Intalio also just announced a similar deal). That adds to earlier relationships with JasperSoft and DATAllegro that take advantage of Ingres’ Icebreaker database appliance. The deal with Alfresco has some interesting history in that CEO John Newton, who also founded Documentum, was one of Ingres’ early core developers back in the 1980s.

The announcement come in the heels of another step in Ingres’ open source journey, which is that they have finally opened a Subversion repository so developers can more readily check source code in and out. Before, developers simply got binary downloads. Engineering VP Emma McGrattan admitted the moves were, in our paraphrasing, a bit bass-ackwards. “First you open a Subversion repository, then you grow a community, but we did it backwards,” she noted.

Among active projects, McGrattan pointed to Ingres Café, an effort begun as a graduate project by a University of Carleton computer science student to bundle Ingres with the Eclipse Data Tools Project (DTP), Hibernate persistence, JSF (Java Server Faces), and the Apache Tomcat servlet container in a single preconfigured install. Ingres just took over the project a few weeks ago. Other projects include applying column-level encryption and Ruby integration.

While some open source companies take advantage of the Apache license because it allows vendors to add proprietary content, Ingres’ strategy has been to use a dual licensing scheme: GPL for pure open source, and a moiré conventional business license for third parties like DATAllegro that wish to commercialize their own content.

Ingres sees MySQL and Oracle Express as its major rivals, positioning itself as the more scalable alternative (Oracle Express is limited to a single CPU, while it contends that MySQL is best for read-only or low volume read-write web apps).

McGrattan views the Café project as being a good example of what’s possible with Eclipse’s Equinox run time project. “It will help us focus on making the run time as simple as possible.”

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