That doesn't surprise Mark Brewer, CEO of Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Covalent Technologies Inc.

"Even though Ingres is as rich functionalitywise as Oracle, software developers in college don't think Ingres is sexy," said Brewer. "The only community Ingres has is its existing user base."

That community is much smaller today than it was in previous years, with only 8,000 to 10,000 users worldwide, according to Ingres. The North American Ingres Users Association has been largely inactive for several years, said sources. But one Ingres user conference last year drew about 150 attendees, according to Nick Vancas, president of Ingres support provider Database Management Technology Inc., which co-sponsored the event with CA.

According to Park, "CA never managed to capture the imagination of the open-source community. We run both Ingres and MySQL internally, and Ingres is so far advanced in ease of use, performance and robustness. But when people think of open-source databases, they do not think Ingres. In my opinion, this is the battle that matters."

And it's one they are likely to lose, said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group. He said Ingres will have a hard time "standing out," with open-source databases on one side and free versions of Oracle and SQL Server on the other.