In what may be a sign of perceived restlessness among MySQL users, a rival open source database firm is offering to ease the migration path away from the open source system, due soon to become part of Oracle.

On Tuesday, Ingres Corp., the company founded to sell and support open source Ingres, announced EasyIngres, a product that helps PHP developers who often use MySQL to create Ingres-compatible applications.

Assuring one brand of database users that they can create applications in a familiar manner for another database is one of the keys to achieving a switchover, said Emma McGrattan, senior VP of engineering at Ingres, in making the announcement.

EasyIngres actually came from outside of the commercial company. Cedric Pasquotti, a PHP developer based in France, became an Ingres user and realized there were ways to make it much easier to develop for the system using PHP. The popular Web scripting language did not exist when Ingres was born at the University of California at Berkeley.

Pasquotti founded the EasyIngres project as part of the Ingres developer community. It bundles several pieces of open source code together with a PHP development environment. Included is the Ingres Developer Workbench and Ingres 9.2, along with the Apache Web server, Scite Editor and Frequent Flyer application.

An Ingres representative said the developer package "comes at a critical time when MySQL developers are on stand-by, waiting to see the outcome of Oracle's purchase of Sun."

In May, Michael Widenius, a MySQL AB founder and lead developer for the MySQL database, announced he was founding the Open Database Alliance, "to provide a central clearinghouse for MySQL development, to encourage a true open development environment with community participation and to ensure that MySQL code remains extremely high quality." He added that MySQL community faced some "uncertainty" as Oracle acquires the current owner of MySQL, Sun Microsystems.

Ingres indicated the EasyIngres PHP bundle for PHP developers comes "at a critical time when MySQL developers are on standby, waiting to see the outcome of Oracle's purchase of Sun." With EasyIngres, they can add development skills for an additional database based on their existing PHP knowledge.

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