The rise of the open source database
Zack Urlocker is at the Gartner Open Source Summit this week, and has been hearing some good things about open source databases. Open source databases (Sleepycat, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have been around for a long time, but the analysts didn’t give them much credit because even though everyone was using them, few were paying for them. Or so they thought. Now, however, open source databases are becoming big business.
Zack cites Gartner’s Donald Feinberg:
Overall, Gartner is predicting that the worldwide DBMS market is around $14 billion and will continue to grow by nearly 7% per year. If this was a new market, it would not be a very impressive growth rate, but for a market of this size, it’s huge. And there can be lots of movement within the market. We are at the start of a new era where migration to open source technology is going to fuel the DBMS market. That includes migration away from Unix to Linux and from closed source to open source.A few key findings from Gartner / IDC research:
- By 2008, open source databases will be used by more than 70% of IT organizations [Asay note: I’d actually be surprised if the number isn’t already closer to 100%. There’s a lot of open source database usage that isn’t registered by the CIO or whomever it is that talks with Gartner/other analysts.]
- By 2008, MySQL will be a serious choice for mission critical applications [Asay note: See below.]
- 56% of companies surveyed plan to switch to Linux as a DBMS platform
- Linux will surpass Unix as the leading DBMS platform within the next 3 years, even for the most demanding database applications
- 40% of surveyed companies are planning to replace proprietary DBMS with open source
- 49% of respondents have MySQL in deployment with 17% planning to deploy
This is impressive, despite the fact that the “Big Boys” still control 92% of the market, as Gartner reported earlier this year:
And it’s still funny to me that MySQL isn’t considered “mission critical.” It would be hard to find more demanding applications than Google, Yahoo!, Orbitz, etc. They all run MySQL. Lots of MySQL. Even Oracle runs MySQL.
Here’s a thought: Oracle is quickly building and buying its way into the center of the enterprise software ecosystem, using the database as the hub for all the enterprise application “spokes” it’s building/acquiring (CRM, ERP, ECM, etc.). Don’t you think that MySQL is well-positioned to do the same, except with open source applications?
Hmm….