Ingres Database 10, the latest version of Ingres Corporation's flagship open source database product is now generally available. Developed at Ingres and with input from the open source community, Ingres Database 10 now supports multi-versioning, column encryption, partitioning and faster bulk loading.
"We have tremendous demand from partners, most notably independent software vendors. to move their application from other database technology to Ingres and, as we have been working with many of these ISVs over the last 3 years, they have highlighted some features that, if we could provide them, would make it dramatically easier for them to move their applications to Ingres," Roger Burkhardt, CEO at Ingres, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Ingres 10 is a very big release for us. It is the biggest release certainly in the last 5 years, and every feature in it is driven by a desire to make it easier for ISVs as well as end customers to move to get the benefits of the Ingres technology and the Ingres business model."
Among these key new features is multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), which provides concurrent access to the database, or a "snapshot" for each user to work with so they are never locked out, improves performance in multi-user situations and increases productivity. The release also includes new SQL types, functions and compatibility features. A community-based migration toolkit developed earlier this year and hosted on Sourceforce.com is also intended to aid in migration to Ingres from Oracle's enterprise and MySQL databases, according to Ingres.
In addition, Ingres Database 10 adds column encryption capabilities, enabling database administrators to secure specific fields in a record such as credit card numbers or Social Security numbers. Also making it easier for ISVs to move applications to Ingres is support for long identifiers, Burkhardt says. "Some people have written applications using very, very long names for tables and so by changing the Ingres database to support such long names we make it much easier for them to move their applications to Ingres."
According to the vendor, Ingres Database 10 also improves the bulk loading performance, cutting load times by upwards of 50% via a standard Java Database Connectivity 4.0 driver. Queries on partitioned tables are more efficient, including a unique ability to perform dynamic partition pruning during query processing. Other performance enhancements include batch query execution in which query execution responses are sent back to the client in batches. Additionally, queries on partitioned tables are more efficient, with the ability to perform dynamic partition elimination during query processing.
Ingres Database 10 adds also support for JDBC 4.0.
More information about the features can be found here.