Database Revival

IBM also treats open-source databases as seeding the market. "It's a great opportunity for us," says Bob Picciano, the company's VP of data management. "The more people who have access to database code, the more luck we'll have in displacing the incumbent vendor-that's Oracle." IBM sells its low-end, embeddable Cloudscape Java database for a $499 annual maintenance fee.

Fighting Back
Microsoft, once the low-cost provider, now sits somewhere in the middle. A no-cost, lightweight version of SQL Server will serve some purposes, but the standard edition is far from free: Its entry-level price of $5,999, plus $1,849 for five users, competes against Oracle's price of $15,000 per CPU or $300 per named user for Oracle Standard Edition. At last week's SQL Server 2005 launch, CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft shipped 406,000 copies of SQL Server last year. SQL Server sales grew 18% in 2004, compared with 14.6% for Oracle, according to Gartner.

SQL Server 2005 embodies how the market leaders are fighting open-source competitors by doing what they do best: adding features and functions. SQL Server 2005 has 23 new business-intelligence algorithms, reporting capabilities that can be embedded in applications, and the ability to add stored procedures or triggers for frequently executed database functions inside the database without mastering the specialized TSQL database language. "Those of you who know how to program in .Net don't need to go off and learn another programming model," Ballmer said.

Chris Troia, CIO at bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc., says the new business-intelligence features in SQL Server 2005 let his company spot trends within daily sales data, something it had always found difficult. "We need to know, 'What are the sleeper items?' The bookselling business is still a local business. If a chef has a restaurant and he writes a cookbook, lots of copies will sell in that local area," he says.

IBM is pumping up DB2 with a soon-to-be-revealed Viper version that can manage structured and unstructured data. Oracle says it already does that, but Picciano says IBM is adding sophisticated XML-handling properties so XML documents aren't torn apart for storage, then reassembled later.

Feature Overload
Yet gobs of features may not be what all users need. A Forrester Research survey found that many database customers weren't using all the bells and whistles on their high-end systems and that open-source databases could provide the needed functionality. For that reason, Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna thinks open-source databases will push into midsize and even upper-tier business applications over the next two or three years.

One thing that makes Ingres Corp. look viable to Garnett & Helfrich Capital, the private-equity firm that owns a majority stake in the company, is the fact that 5,000 Ingres users already pay for support. New customers will come from the copies of Ingres that continue to ship with many CA products, such as CA-Unicenter Service Desk. Ingres Corp. will charge $1,995 a year per processor for 24-hour support, a fraction of what the average Oracle, SQL Server, or DB2 user pays. "Ingres is a recognized brand. That could put pressure on [commercial] support prices as well," says Rob Enderle, principal of the Enderle Group analyst firm. CA, which released Ingres to the open-source community last year, owns a 20% stake in Ingres Corp.

Paper manufacturer Bowater Inc. runs its order-fulfillment system on Ingres. "We use it every day, 24 hours a day. It scales up well," says Tyler McGraw, staff database administrator. He hopes that a stronger community of developers will build up around the database under Ingres Corp.

Database buyers now have more choices, and that strikes a chord with Stride Rite's Lefebvre, who saw maintenance fees increase after an Oracle audit earlier this year. "If I were CIO," Lefebvre says, "I'd be willing to take a chance" on the alternatives. Some CIOs appear to be reading his mind.