Six months after announcing their intentions, Ingres is releasing the fruits of its tie-in with rPath to release a database stack on a computer without an operating system. Ingres is releasing Icebreaker, which you could consider a database in a box.

embeds relevant pieces of Linux beneath the covers, was tried by a dozen customers and business partners since the beta was introduced last October.

Of course, the idea of appliance is appealing as it implies little or no administrative overhead. Traditionally, appliances have relied on highly proprietary OSs because of the need to control stability at all costs. And for the most part, appliances have been restructured to relatively low-level infrastructural functions such as firewalls.

But with growing maturity of Linux, appliances are starting to climb higher up the stack. For instance, Cast Iron now offers an appliance that covers data integration. So, this is the category that Ingres is targeting.

Of course, the idea of embedding a database in the operating system isn't new. Modern incarnations began with the IBM S/38 midrange, which eventually gave birth to the AS/400 (today the System i). The idea was that, by embedding a database into the platform, you need fewer admins and you have less breakable parts for traditional “cowboys” to mess up.

Furthermore, Ingres’ foray isn’t the first time that a database appliance has been tried. Oracle attempted it with Raw Iron back around 1999 – 2000, but foundered because it was tied too closely to Sun Solaris and the underlying SPARC hardware. According to Dave Dargo, CTO of Ingres, the fact that both companies were open source helped considerably speed time to market. Speaking his former days at Oracle, Dargo noted that IP issues often tended to bog down product development projects. (Oracle has recently begun a second stab at the idea.)

In this case, the goal is to make the OS simply disappear. You don't have to install, configure, or maintain it because it’s under the hood, meaning that you’d have only one vendor’s neck to strangle if something goes wrong. At this point, however to take advantage of the Ingres appliance, customers still have to buy raw boxes off the shelf without the OS, then install Ingres themselves. Presumably, in the future Ingres would love to conclude some OEM deals.

In this case, Ingres is going the appliance route to differentiate itself against MySQL, which has led the open source database market in carving out a niche in web applications; and EnterpriseDB, which is targeting the Oracle compatibility market. The appliance configuration of Ingres supports the database’s existing virtualization and clustering capabilities.

By the way, rPath’s other partners include Digium, which provides an open source PBX appliance. The company recently won a small business innovation grant from the U.S. Department of energy to create Xen (an open source alternative to VMware) virtual machine images for grid environments such as the Open Science Grid. It first introduced the rBuilder platform for embedding Linux into appliances earlier this year.

The Ingres Icebreaker database appliance is available now.

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