Database vendor Ingres has teamed up with Red Hat to offer an open source developer stack with features intended to be comparable to proprietary offerings from the likes of IBM or Oracle.

The Ingres Development Stack for JBoss combines the Ingres database with Red Hat's JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. This allows the development of Java applications and provides the middleware and database software to support those applications, Ingres said in an announcement.

Ingres said it has pre-configured all the components to work together, and it has provided documented sample applications to get developers started.

The company said it is aiming at developers who want enterprise-grade features at a lower cost than would be offered by proprietary offerings. Features provided by the stack include hot back-up, active-passive high availability, online table and index reorganisation, security auditing, database partitioning and parallel query execution.

"Java developers that have previously used JBoss Developer Studio with another underlying database technology will find the move to Ingres to be completely seamless," said Ingres vice president of product management, Deb Woods, in a statement.

Ingres, the second-largest open source company after Red Hat, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers.

The company is focused on moving open source software deeper into enterprises, and has said it sees the credit crunch as fueling demand for open source generally.

Ingres chief financial officer Tom Berquist said in December that the company also believes the move toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) will create an open source boom, because it requires SaaS vendors to spend large amounts on hardware and software.

"The more we move towards cloud computing, the more that rewards open source, because the cloud software vendor cannot afford to pay for software for, say, 25,000 server CPUs," Berquist said at the time.

The development stack is available immediately from Ingres for a 90-day trial period. Ingres and Red Hat said they plan to sell developer support services as well as technical support for production applications.