Last time we talked, you didn't divulge many details about the product development. Four months later, have you formulated a product development roadmap? On Feb. 7, we released Ingres 2006, which has a new licensing, packaging and pricing model. We will also have a product coming out in the first half of 2007. We're doing things that are subtle changes to major features we already have. Other open-source database vendors are still trying to write basic partitioning and cluster management. We're adding things like bit-mapped indexing and temporal types of partitioning.

In the area of XML data storage, we'll let IBM and Oracle battle it out. Ingres still stores XML data as BLOBs. I don't want to bend the company around application-specific issues that will pull us away from the big picture.

Ingres is the only C2-level secure database out there. We can encrypt data in movement today. Encryption of data at rest is usually at the operating system level. We're seeing if we can put it into the open-source product.

With our community edition of Ingres, we expect to have a new release each month. Then when we roll out as a single enterprise-class release in a year, people know it's been through a heavier testing environment. We're also working with partners to create an Ingres-type software appliance that makes it very easy to provide support for both OS and database. We're also talking to them about how we can share the development work.

We haven't decided yet whether to open-source the OpenROAD, Enterprise Access and EDBC products.