OSS DB Rodeo Roundup

Was talking with Greg Mullane last night and mentioned an [http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28201 article in the Inquirer] that I thought provided a pretty good round-up of the current open source database offerings. One of my favorite parts was in the “company profile” section where it listed for PostgreSQL:
Number of employees: 0 - PostgreSQL is a project, not a company
That’s so hard for most tech writers to figure out that it’s nice to recognize someone who actually get’s it. But the real reason I brought it up, and the reason I’m mentioning it here, is that it also lists that [http://www.ingres.com/ Ingres] has a current install base of 8,000 - 10,000 active users. We couldn’t really decide if this number was high or low (anyone know how this compares with companies like [http://sybase.com/ Sybase] or [http://www.progress.com/index.ssp Progress]?) but it seemed awfully low to me, just considering that there must be at least this many active installations of PostgreSQL, based on the 1 million downloads of 8.0 and a conservative adoption rate of 1% of downloaders. And that to me is significant because Ingres has managed to hang around for 20 years and is even at this point considered a a multi-million dollar company based on [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/110705-ca-ingres.html the recent dump that CA did of the product], so you have to figure PostgreSQL really is a major player in this market. Yeah I know, most of you probably already knew that, but it’s always good to have some empirical evidence you can show to others. And by the way, it looks even worse if you compare it to my$ql’s claimed 6 million installations. While I would bet that the real number of my$ql installations is considerably lower, it’s still high enough to show you just how marginal Ingres has become. If you’re running Ingres, it might be time to start making your [http://www.sraapowergres.com/en/whitepapers/informix_whitepaper.pdf migration] plans.