Ingres
Business-Software-Books.us
CAD-CAM-Books.us
Computer-Books.us
Database-Books.us
Java-Books.us
Linux-Books.us
If you know of a quality book that we should include on this page, please let me know.
| Non-Book Resources |
| Ingres is a
commercially supported, open-source relational database management
system. Ingres was first created as a research project at the
University of California, Berkeley starting in the early 1970s and
ending in the early 1980s. The original code, like that from other
projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of
the BSD license. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres had spawned a number of
commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL
Server, NonStop SQL and a number of others. Postgres (Post Ingres), a
project which started in the mid-1980s, later evolved into PostgreSQL.
By any measure, Ingres is one of the most influential modern computer
research projects. In 1973 when the System R project was getting started at IBM, the research team released a series of papers describing the system they were building. Two scientists at Berkeley, Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, became interested in the concept after reading the papers, and decided to start a relational database research project of their own. They had already raised money for researching a geographic database system for Berkeley's economics group, which they called Ingres, for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System. They decided to use this money to fund their relational project instead, and used this as a seed for a new and much larger project. For further funding Stonebraker approached the DARPA, the obvious funding source for computing research and development at the time, but both the DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) turned them down as they were already funding database research elsewhere. Stonebraker then introduced his idea to other agencies, and, with help from his colleagues he eventually obtained modest support from the NSF and three military agencies: the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the Navy Electronic Systems Command. Thus funded, Ingres was developed during the mid-1970s by a rotating team of students and staff. Ingres went through an evolution similar to that of System R, with an early prototype in 1974 followed by major revisions to make the code maintainable. Ingres was then disseminated to a small user community, and project members rewrote the prototype repeatedly to incorporate accumulated experience, feedback from users, and new ideas. Ingres remained largely similar to IBM's System R in concept, but based on "low end" systems, namely Unix on DEC machines. |