Editing Ingres (database) (section)

===Commercialization (1980s)===
Ingres remained largely similar to IBM's System R in concept, but it was based largely on [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] machines running
[[Unix]].<ref name=Woodfill79/> Unlike System R, Ingres benefited from Unix's growing popularity and was available for free;{{r|rdbmsearlyyearsoh20070612}} source code was available (on tape) for a nominal fee. By 1980 some 1,000 copies had been distributed,<ref>{{cite book
  |title=The Rise of Relational Databases - Funding a Revolution |url=https://www.nap.edu/read/6323/chapter/8|doi=10.17226/6323|isbn=978-0-309-06278-7|year=1999}}</ref> primarily to universities. Many students from Berkeley and other universities who used the Ingres source code worked on various commercial database software systems.

Many asked when Ingres would become a commercial product. After hearing that [[Larry Ellison]] was comparing the [[Oracle Database]] to Ingres, the project formed a commercial company, borrowed university computers in exchange for a free license, and ported the database from Unix to [[VAX VMS]]. The The first product release occurred in early 1981; among the customers were [[DEC (company)|DEC]] and [[Schlumberger]]. Demand for the VMS version was so much stronger than on Unix that the company neglected the latter and had to port the software back to it.{{r|rdbmsingressybase20070613}}

Berkeley students Jerry Held and later Karel Youseffi moved to [[Tandem Computers]], where they built a database system that evolved into [[NonStop SQL]]. The Tandem database system was a re-implementation of the Ingres technology.<ref>{{cite web
|quote=Youseffi (at Tandem Computers) built a system that evolved into NonStop SQL. The Tandem database system was a re-implementation of the Ingres technology.
|title=Capt. Horatio T.P. Webb MIS 4372 Database Alternatives
|url=https://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/dbhistory.htm}}</ref> It evolved into a system that ran effectively on [[parallel computer]]s; that is, it included functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions (the last being fairly difficult). Components of the system were first released in the late 1970s. By 1989, the system could run queries in parallel and the product became fairly famous for being one of the few systems that scales almost linearly with the number of processors in the machine: adding a second CPU to an existing NonStop SQL server will almost exactly double its performance. Tandem was later purchased by [[Compaq]], which started a re-write in 2000, and now the product is at [[Hewlett Packard Enterprise|Hewlett-Packard Enterprise]].

In the early 1980s, Ingres competed head-to-head with [[Oracle database|Oracle]],<ref>{{cite journal
|quote=This article traces the development of the Oracle RDBMS through the mainframe, ... innovations that allowed Oracle to compete so successfully in the market
|title=The Oracle Story: 1984 – 2001  |author=Andrew Mendelsohn
|journal=IEEE Annals of the History of Computing |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=10–23 |doi=10.1109/MAHC.2012.56|year=2013 |s2cid=17907189 }}</ref> but IBM's endorsement of SQL benefited Oracle.<ref name="morgenthaler20051208">{{Cite interview |last=Morgenthaler |first=Gary |interviewer=Luann Johnson |title=Oral History of Gary Morgenthaler |url=https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Morgenthaler_Gary/Morgenthaler_Gary_1.oral_history.2005.102658005.pdf |access-date=2025-05-30 |format=PDF |publisher=Computer History Museum |date=2005-12-08 |page=18}}</ref> The two products were widely regarded as the leading hardware-independent relational database implementations; they had comparable functionality, performance, market share, and pricing, and many commentators considered Ingres to be a (perhaps marginally) superior product. From around 1985, however, Ingres steadily lost market share. One reason was Oracle's aggressive marketing; another was the increasing recognition of SQL as the preferred relational query language. Ingres originally had provided a different language, [[QUEL query languages|QUEL]], and the conversion to SQL (delivered in Ingres version 6) took about three years, losing valuable time in the race.

Robert Epstein, the chief programmer on the project while he was at Berkeley, formed [[Britton Lee, Inc.]]<ref>{{cite book  |date=1999
|quote=Robert Epstein, the chief programmer at Ingres in the 1970s, went on to co-found Britton-Lee Incorporated and then Sybase.
|title=Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research
|url=https://archive.org/details/fundingrevolutio00nati  |url-access=registration
|isbn=978-0309062787|last1=Council
|first1=National Research
|last2=Board
|first2=Computer Science Telecommunications
|last3=History
|first3=Committee on Innovations in Computing Communications: Lessons From
}}</ref> along with other students from the Ingres Project, [[Paula Hawthorn]] and Michael Ubell; they were joined later by [[Eric Allman]]. Later, Epstein founded [[Sybase]]. Sybase had been the #2 product (behind [[Oracle database|Oracle]]) for some time through the 1980s and into the 1990s, before [[Informix]] came "out of nowhere" and took over in 1997. Sybase's product line had also been licensed to [[Microsoft]] in 1992, who rebranded it as [[Microsoft SQL Server]]. This relationship soured in the late 1990s, and today SQL Server outsells Sybase by a wide margin.