Old Databases Never Die and Some Won't Even Fade Away....

Those like author who are bit long in the tooth may remember Relational Technology (RTI), the original developers of the Ingres Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that ultimately lost out to Oracle in the RDBMS wars of the early 1990s. Ingres never actually died, it got bought by a company called Ask Corporation in 1990 which itself was bought by CA in 1994. Never comfortable in the CA stable, Ingres eventually extracted itself in 2004 and reemerged as an open source company. When meeting with the current management team this week, the author comments that "If one can't sell it, give it away" was countered with a list of more positive reasons for the move.