Ingres' business strategy will be to woo users with its comparatively cheap $2,000-per-CPU annual support fee and target users that are adding databases, rather than tackling the more difficult task of convincing them to migrate their existing ones, said Chief Technology Officer Dave Dargo, who, like Garnett, is an Oracle Corp. veteran.

"I am a lot happier about their plans for the product and how this will benefit us current users, not only in terms of raising the profile of Ingres but also increased investment into the technology," said David Postle, chairman of the U.K. Ingres Users Association.

According to Curt Monash, a consultant in Acton, Mass., and a Computerworld columnist, Ingres' technical features fall somewhere between those of the big commercial databases and the leading open-source ones. In his blog, DBMS2.com, Monash wrote that Ingres R3 "definitely seems to lag in data warehousing," but it is comparable with Oracle's previous version, 9i, in terms of online transaction-processing features and is "certainly ahead of MySQL 5.0."

Vendor revenues from open-source databases are expected to rise from US$250 million this year to $1 billion in 2008, according to Forrester Research Inc. But Ingres must convince open-source developers to adopt and evangelize for Ingres at a time when more buzzworthy alternatives such as MySQL or Postgres exist.

Attracting a strong developer following failed to happen under CA. For example, last year, the company offered $1 million in prizes to open-source developers who created migration tools from other databases to Ingres, but it was only able to give away half of the prize money.