Contributed by Paul Richter:

"Why does everybody hate Oracle?" was the provocative headline used by Bloor Research for a recent piece of analysis. Bloor observed that IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Ingres were all putting effort into eroding the installed base of the Oracle RDBMS. The analysis concluded that Oracle was under attack from these corporate heavyweights because Oracle seemed weak, having diverted too much resource away from its flagship product into developing the applications division.

A second front seems to be opening up for Oracle, with the open source community targeting its bacon as well. Four different projects are aiming to take a slice away from Oracle's core RDBMS business.

The oldest effort is SapDB (now renamed MaxDB). In the mid-90's SAP bought the source code of the Adabas database and added code to process Oracle's join syntax to assist the porting of the SAP business suite. The code was open sourced 5 years ago, but a community failed to develop.

Computer Associates organised a challenge to write porting tools for the newly open
sourced Ingres database. The winners were announced last week and the winning tool adds an Oracle-translation layer for Java applications to Ingres.

Start-up EnterpriseDB has just released the first public beta of its oracle-compatible PostgreSQL version and has started a major publicity initiative to promote the viability of switching applications away from the Oracle RDBMS.

Firebird's oracle mode, nick-named Fyracle, has been quietly building momentum and is perhaps the most developed of the oracle-mode initiatives. About half of its installed base is running the Compiere open source ERP+CRM application and the other half are using it as an Oracle substitute.

It looks like the next two years will see a heavily contested battle for Oracle's user base, with both the traditional competitors and the open source community making waves.

Download links for the open source databases:
MaxDB (80MB)
Shift2Ingres (80MB)
EnterpriseDB (20MB)
Fyracle (5MB)