Red Hat and Ingres will offer a combination of Linux, JBoss middleware and the Ingres open source database as a new open source software stack to application developers around the world, the companies recently announced.

It's neither a duplicate of nor replacement for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP combination) that has already won a wide following of application developers. Instead, the pair is seeking to create an enterprise-ready stack that can be used in transaction processing.

The two have already grained experience with the combination through BBP AG, which builds inter-banking and compliance filtering applications with Ingres, Linux and JBoss that are used by 200 financial institutions, according to an joint announcement made at the Messeturm conference in Frankfurt, Germany, at the end of November.

"We are a long-standing partner of Red Hat and Ingres... we require a platform that is 100% stable and reliable," said Per Trifunovic, CEO of BBP AG, in the Nov. 27 announcement. Trifunovic said his firm was about to migrate its entire service office to software based on the open source stack. It applications process 500 million transactions a year, he said.

JBoss enterprise middleware includes the JBoss application server, Hibernate object/relational mapping, and JBoss Enterprise Portal, among other products. Ingres is the relational database system that came out of research at the University of California at Berkeley and was originally sold by Relational Technology Inc. It was acquired by Ask Computer in 1994, then CA Inc. acquired the Ask Group two years later. CA made the database code available as open source in August 2004, then a year later with a venture partner spun out Ingres as an independent company to support the open source code.

Ingres 9.2 was recently certified by SAP AG as ready to be integrated with SAP NetWeaver applications, giving Ingres another endorsement as a transaction processing and enterprise application database. NetWeaver is both a development and runtime environment for SAP applications and can be used to develop custom applications. Data from an Ingres database can be passed to the NetWeaver Business Intelligence module as well as work directly with applications, said Bertram Mandel, VP of sales, Tuesday in announcing the certification.

The 9.2 release was issued Nov. 18 with improved support for Unicode and a wider variety of international languages. It also had improved support for interfaces to other databases, including ODBC, Java Database Connect and Microsoft .Net Data Provider.

Ingres is also currently used by C&K markets, a 60-store West Coast grocery chain, and the Institute of Technology-Delhi in India, where it supports operations for 2,000 staff and 10,000 students.

Open source content management system Alfresco and open source business intelligence system Jaspersoft both rely on Ingres as their underlying database system.