The Rise and Fall of Ingres: A Case Study in Database Market Competition
A retrospective analysis of Ingres Corporation's failure to compete with Oracle in the relational database market during the 1985-1992 period. The author, a former Ingres employee, examines both product-level technical decisions (query language, locking strategy, read consistency) and business-level failures (misunderstanding market dynamics, underinvestment in sales/marketing) that caused Ingres to decline from market parity to 25% of Oracle's size. The article is framed as commentary on Ingres's recent resurrection as an open-source project.
Metrics in this report
50%
planned
Target annual revenue growth for Ingres during hypergrowth period
100%
planned/achieved
Oracle's target of doubling annually, which it met or exceeded
250$M
point in time
Ingres division revenue after 7 years (approximately 1992)
1000$M
point in time
Oracle Corporation revenue after 7 years (approximately 1992)
30$M
point in time
Ingres Corporation revenue in 1985
30$M
point in time
Oracle Corporation revenue in 1985
100$M
point in time
Capital injection from NTT that helped Oracle survive near-failure around 1990
10executives
count
Number of marketing bosses in 4-5 year period at Ingres
400$M
point in time
Size of parent company when Ingres became a $250M division
100 to 25%
change over period
Ingres market share relative to Oracle declining from parity to one-quarter over 7 years