Skip navigation

C&K Market to Deploy Open Source Database

C&K Market is about a month away from becoming one of the few retailers to go live on an open source database system. Open source refers to any software whose source code is made freely available to users or developers, who can then modify it as they see fit. It stands in sharp contrast to licensed or proprietary software, which is under the control of its creators. The Linux

BROOKINGS, Ore. — C&K Market here is about a month away from becoming one of the few retailers to go live on an open source database system.

“Open source” refers to any software whose source code is made freely available to users or developers, who can then modify it as they see fit. It stands in sharp contrast to licensed or proprietary software, which is under the control of its creators. The Linux operating system is perhaps the most famous example of open source software; it has made inroads into a software market that is dominated by the ubiquitous and proprietary Microsoft Windows operating system.

C&K Market, which operates 60 stores in Oregon and Northern California under the Ray's Food Place, Shop Smart, Price Less Foods and Pharmacy Express banners, has employed a traditional proprietary database from Ingres, Redwood City, Calif., ever since the retailer was running just three stores 25 years ago. After Ingres went to an open source version of the database in 2006, C&K decided last year to migrate to that model in order to remain with the Ingres product, while upgrading to a Dell/Intel hardware platform for the system.

“The fact that we were an Ingres customer for many years lent itself to our upgrading to the new system,” rather than opting for a traditional database from Oracle or Microsoft, said Alan Nidiffer, C&K Market's vice president and chief information officer.

“We're comfortable with the database itself, which has not changed in the new version. But now we hope to take advantage of the open source [nature of the system],” he said.

Because the source code for open source software is free, there is no licensing cost for the new Ingres database — just the cost of support and maintenance. As a result, said Nidiffer, the overall price of the system is “maybe 20%” that of a traditional database system.

Nidiffer, the son of C&K Market's owner and the grandson of its founder, expects the open source aspect of the system to give rise to the development of more applications for the database. “We're excited about the possibility of the [open source] developer tools that sit on top of the database resulting in better reporting and analysis [applications],” he said.

One example of such development is Ingres' Icebreaker business intelligence reporting product, which resulted from the partnership between Ingres and JasperSoft, San Francisco. Nidiffer is looking at acquiring that product. “That's what open source lends itself to: partnering with outside companies and quickly integrating [the result],” he said.

In addition, Nidiffer noted, whereas traditional software companies have set release schedules for upgrades, open source improvements can come at any time. C&K has some experience with open source from its use of Linux, so “we're used to the concept and enjoy the faster development pace,” he said.

According to a case study issued by Ingres, access to the open source development community “will enhance C&K Market's own development team, extending its development resources while enabling the four-person team to focus on requests from across the C&K Market chain of stores.”

Nidiffer also sees the open source database as more scalable and offering better performance than the current version. “Performance-wise, we're at our limits now as far as nightly processing of item-level movement data [goes],” he said. “It now takes several hours, and tests show a 10- to 12-fold improvement in speed, getting us to about 15 minutes.”

Despite these advantages, most retailers, with the exception of Hannaford Bros., Boscov's and Burlington Coat Factory, have tended to stay away from open source software, considering it too risky, said Paula Rosenblum, managing partner, Retail Systems Research, Miami. “Five or six years ago, I didn't think it would fall out this way, but it has,” she said. “And every time it seems as though open source is about to make inroads, a large, high-profile outage sets it back again across all enterprises, not just retail.”

Still, open source databases “continue to grow in adoption, offering enterprises a reliable and low-cost alternate solution for supporting small to moderately sized applications,” said a report released last month by Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass.

C&K has developed a variety of mission-critical applications on its legacy Ingres database, including inventory, financial (such as accounts payable and payroll) and human resources. Those applications will be moved over to the open source database when it goes live in several weeks, Nidiffer said.