A while ago we were approached by a company using OpenJPA for their product wanting us to help them port it to Ingres. It fell to me to do the work and it ended up being really interesting, so I thought I'd share some of the progress that's been made.

JPA is a "Persistence Framework" for Java, meaning a way to store a program's data, usually represented in an application as objects, into a database. [url=http://openjpa.apache.org]OpenJPA[/url] is the Apache Foundation's implementaion of this framework. Its design allows for the underlying datastore to be easily changed with minimal reconfiguration - and no recoding. This is exactly the sort of vendor-neutral design that we strive for at Luminary and so getting Ingres support would be really useful for the whole community.

The initial development went well and the company have been using their product against Ingres for a little while now, so it seems to do the trick! It will soon be submitted to the Apache Foundation as part of the main OpenJPA build but there's still a few bugs to iron out.

The really interesting part of the development was looking inside the Ingres JDBC driver and getting to know some of the Ingres development team who look after it.