The Rise of Open-Source Databases

Technology is advancing more quickly than ever. What was seemingly not possible in past is quickly becoming reality. Who, a few years back, would have thought that open-source databases would become commercially viable? Nonetheless, today, open-source databases are not only getting increased traction but are also replacing proprietary databases.

The database landscape is changing very rapidly. According to the 2019 Gartner State of the Open-Source DBMS Market Research Report:

“By 2022, more than 70 percent of new in-house applications will be developed on an open-source database management system (OSDBMS), and 50 percent of existing commercial relational database management system (RDBMS) instances will have been converted or will be in process of converting.”

Open-source databases are disrupting the $50 billion database industry. Let’s look at some of the major factors driving such phenomenal growth of open-source transactional RDBMS. 

1. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

One of the most important and major factors the business wants to move from proprietary databases to open-source databases is cost. The TCO of open-source databases is way less than a proprietary DBMS. According to EnterpriseDB, customers can save as much as 65% on total database-related costs with PostgreSQL compared to commercial databases.

2. Vibrant and Growing Community   

Popular open-source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL have big communities. There are plenty of users who participate and contribute to the community and keep it thriving. Having a large active community makes it easier to access a lot of information about different database technologies. People posting use cases, problems, questions, answers, scaling challenges, etc. make it easier for others to find information.

3. Database Features and Compatibility

With a wider community and vendor-backed customized features, open-source databases are becoming more compatible with commercial databases with every new release and thereby bridging the gap between commercial and open-source databases. Having commercial database like features available in open-source databases makes it easy for organizations to strategize how to switch from a commercial database to an open source database.

4. Success Stories

As big organizations adopt open-source databases and some share details of how open-source databases are successfully implemented, more companies will feel more confident in their ability to develop new applications or move existing databases to open source. Given the number of organizations using open-source databases, it is clear that open-source databases have the ability to support business-critical enterprise workloads. There are some big organizations like Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, and Twitter using MySQL and other organizations like Uber, Instagram, and Spotify using PostgreSQL.

5. Emergence of Cloud and DBaaS

With cloud computing becoming mainstream, DBaaS (database-as-a-service) has emerged as a popular choice for many shops. Cloud vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are offering DBaaS. Opting for database-as-a-service frees customers up from dealing with complex database infrastructure. Opting for DBaaS also means databases will be fully managed and supported by respective DBaaS vendors. All the major cloud vendors provide MySQL and PostgreSQL DBaaS. Given that the entire database infrastructure will be managed and supported by cloud vendors and open-source databases are readily available to use, more and more organizations are opting to go with open-source databases.