The annual gathering of UK managers, developers, consultants, clients and users of the Ingres RDBMS takes place in London on Tuesday 7th June 2011.

The agenda includes presentations on new and forthcoming features, the prospects of the product in the RDBMS market and the years' developments, as well as educational seminars on various areas of the product such as administration, development, debugging, tool using and much more

This year's themes have not been officially announced yet, but some breakout session abstracts have been released as a sneak peak and subjects to be discussed include:

• "Getting Started with Ingres in the Amazon Cloud"
• "OpenROAD Status and Roadmap"
• "Analysing High-Speed Streams of Data with Vectorwise"

and speakers include Karl Schendel, Emma McGrattan, Bill Maimone, and Roy Hann.

The IUAUK Conference & Presentation Index has extracts from talks at past conferences

Ingres is one of the oldest RDBMS products coming out of University research, but it underwent numerous managerial and internal structuring woes that left it behind competition. After claiming its independence from CA (Computer Associates) it established itself with its own brand name has been able to solely focus on the product (which it also open sourced) and managed to establish itself as one of the major players in the RDBMS market as well as rendering itself a straightforward competitor to the big and long standing vendors.

Ingres Database 10 is a modern, robust and multi platform product running on many Linux and Unix flavours as well as on Windows. It supports many providers (DBD, ODBC, .NET, JDBC) to interact with, embedded SQL with C, a proprietary language called Openroad 4GL that can built GUI client applications as well as rich clients for the web, a graphical admin panel, multi-OS network communication through VNODES , ANSI transaction isolation level support (although version 10 incorporates the MVCC transaction model, a feature long overdue), row level locking and many more features encountered in a modern RDBMS

Lately it has been making headlines with a side-project called Vectorwise which targets interactive reporting, data analysis and business intelligence. At the moment Ingres and Vectorwise are two distinct components that interact and cooperate with each other but it is planned to unify the code bases into one product at some point in the future

Ingres comes with a dual licensing scheme and dual versions - a free community edition and an Enterprise edition. The difference is that, since it is licensed under GPL and since GPL is a viral license, the code you write against it should also be available under GPL. Thus enterprises wanting to create commercial closed source applications should get the premium license; with it they also buy support and a client account on the Service Desk, an online service that you can file bugs or look for known issues

Community users fear not - there is great active support on the Ingres forums, a Community Wiki, a Knowledge Base with information on just about everything plus online Webinars. 

Registration for the conference