With the release of Ingres Database 9.3 today, the company says it's now easier for developers to migrate their application to the open source system from MySQL, Oracle,SQL Server and Sybase. It does so, the company said, through "improved accessibility of table procedures from within the query" and support for positional parameter notations, making database procedure invocation more flexible.

“As the fate of MySQL is currently in the hands of the European Commission, open source community developers and our global business customers and partners are seeking a more stable, reliable open source database,” said Deb Woods, vice president of product management of Ingres, in a statement. She was referring, of course, to the Sept. 3 investigation launched by the EC into possible conflicts between Oracle and MySQL due to Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which owns MySQL. Source code for both databases is available under open source licensing.

Also reportedly new in version 9.3 is a pluggable authentication modules (PAM) structure that allows the database to support more authentication mechanisms than before, and simplifies integration with programs that support multiple security services. Authorization programs can run either with no special privileges or with shadow group privileges, providing less security exposure, the company said. It's also compatible with Liferay, the open source portal and social collaboration platform. This is intended to simplify customization for large organizational structures, such as developing individual security permissions for separate business units.

Enhancements to ODBC, JDBC and .NET Data Provider capabilities give 9.3 the ability to automatically start multiple Data Access Servers "to improve scalability in environments where large numbers of .NET and JDBC applications are connecting to Ingres," reported the company. Ingres also now includes a JDBC driver properties generator, further simplifying setup.