The news broke today, first on InfoWorld, then perhaps on other sites, that next week at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Computer Associates is planning to fulfill a promise it made this spring and deliver its Ingres r3 database to the open source community. CA made that public at its CA World conference back in May, with the stated goal of open sourcing Ingres within 90 days. But the more interesting piece of CA’s plan is that the company is hoping to compete with proprietary databases and has its sites set on surpassing Oracle 10g in terms of performance. Tony Gaughan, senior vice president of CA, told me last week that although Ingres r3 admittedly lags behind Oracle 10g for now, Ingres blows SQL Server away on the same hardware, and is comparable to Oracle 9i. Furthermore, he said CA plans to catch up to and perform better than Oracle 10g. Now those are some bold claims. Although it may have appeared to most people that CA was riding out the Ingres wave until it crashed upon the shore, in fact the company has spent the last 12-18 months developing the database. Naturally, naysayers maintain that CA is embarking on the nearly impossible: trying to fight its way into an already mature market and elbow entrenched database soldiers aside. While I don’t expect any enterprises to replace existing databases with Ingres r3 or even to add Ingres into, say, an Oracle shop where they otherwise would choose to add another Oracle database, CA and at least one industry analyst claim that there are opportunities, namely emerging companies and SMBs that need either a first or even a new database. Here is my challenge to CA: put Ingres r3 through the TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Conuncil) benchmarks. I’d like to see how Ingres stacks up against Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 in the benchmark tests, even if those tests do not always reflect real-world scenarios. The TPC benchmark, at the very least, would bring CA’s claims out of the abstract and into concrete, quantifiable terms. And for the record, I’d hope that the race is closer than doubters might anticipate it to be. Technology Industry