An extensive survey shows the attitude of the market towards open source databases, drivers and inhibitors to adoption

Seventy percent of a $46 billion market is a lot. This is the share of the overall database market open source databases are projected to hold, according to Gartner. An extensive survey done by Percona shows the attitude of the market towards open source databases.

The Open Source Data Management Software Survey was undertaken by Percona, a company offering services for open source databases, to capture usage patterns and opinions of the people who use open source databases. The survey, unveiled today at Percona’s Open Source database conference in Amsterdam, included 836 of them from 85 countries, which means it’s a good way to get insights.

The first key finding seems to confirm the intuition and observations of many people working in the field. Practically everyone is running multiple databases, and multiple open source databases at that. Where things get more interesting, is when it comes to polyglot persistence, aka using different data storage technologies to handle different data storage needs.

Seventy-three percent of respondents are running both relational and other databases, while 54% are running a non-relational database. A bit of clarification is needed here though. In the graphic, those databases are denoted as NoSQL. While that’s understandable, in terms of term brevity and familiarity, it may actually be misleading in terms of functionality.

Today, many non-relational databases (or data management platforms, if we want to include solutions like Hadoop, for example) actually support SQL. Although the NoSQL moniker has been redefined to “not only SQL”, it’s good to be aware of the fact that SQL does not just apply to relational databases. That’s something to keep in mind when interpreting answers related to polyglot persistence.

While it seems like practically everyone is using an operational relational database, a SQL interface may well be available for many other solutions too, such as analytical, streaming, multi-model, or time-series. We would even argue that solutions with the ability to offer a familiar SQL interface have an edge in terms of lowering the entry barrier to adoption.

Percona’s survey goes to considerable lengths analyzing the use of MySQL and PostgreSQL and their variants. That’s understandable, as these 2 appear as the dominant relational open source database platforms, and Percona’s business revolves around them to some extent.

MySQL Community edition is used by 59% of respondents, who also use MariaDB Community edition and Percona Server (36 and 34% , respectively), while other options trail. In PostgreSQL, the picture is different: 46% use PostgreSQL, the next option is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, at only 9% , and other options show little adoption.

Percona, on its part, noted there are more details and a deeper dive into some database options, not because they are Percona products, but because they dominate the market. Percona also noted there were several questions where the options were wider, and respondents could add details. In any case, worth keeping the usual caveat about surveys in mind: results may not be 100% representative of the real world.

We think this may apply, in particular, to input related to polyglot persistence. The survey’s results show about 50% of respondents use Redis and Elastic, with Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle and SQLLite between 38 and 28%, and all others trailing far behind.

All others, in this case, includes solutions like Kafka and Cassandra. Not to mention more “exotic” solutions such as graph databases, which only score a negligible 3%. This does not match our own experience very well, so it’s something to be aware of. Insights related to cloud adoption, on the other hand, are much more in line with what we see.

As the survey notes, most survey respondents are well-informed about using open source technology in the cloud, and many of them do. Interestingly, however, these passionate open source evangelists championing cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and freedom from vendor lock-in often find themselves tied to cloud vendors with a single solution and large monthly costs.

Read the full article on ZDNet