Normally one open source company doesn't try to directly convert followers of a similar project or those of a rival open source company. For open source participants, it's a live-and-let-live world out there. But everyone else is trying to steal Sun Microsystems customers. Why not Ingres, as well?

Ingres, the open source database system, has announced that it is offering an easy migration path from MySQL to Ingres. The migration path also works in moving Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and Sybase users over to Ingres' latest 9.3 release as well, but it was the MySQL migration that was mentioned in the announcement's headline.

Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun, owner of the open source MySQL database. Oracle had expected to complete the acquisition soon after the U.S. Dept. of Justice signed off on it Aug. 20, but on Sept. 3, the European Commission announced it would conduct a secondary investigation into the anti-competitive aspects of the deal. That investigation is likely to put off the final merger for several months.

During the interim, IBM and HP have been citing uncertainty over the future of Sun's hardware architecture to encourage migrations to their own systems and offering easy terms as enticement. The latest to get into the act is Ingres.

"As the fate of MySQL is currently in the hands of the European Commission, open source community developers are seeking a more stable, reliable open source database," said Deb Woods, VP of Ingres product management, in the announcement. "We encourage anyone looking for an alternative to consider migration today Ingres 9.3 offers easy migration from MySQL," she said.

In the 9.3 release, Ingres added features commonly used by both MySQL and Oracle applications to further the goal of smooth migrations.

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