Marten Mickos may no longer run MySQL, but his ghost still haunts the database market.
Years ago, Mickos declared,
"The relational database market is a $9 billion a year market. I want
to shrink it to $3 billion and take a third of the market." MySQL never
got to that point, generating roughly $100 million in sales before being
acquired by Sun for $1 billion, but that commoditization urge has hit
the database market hard.
How hard? Today's open source databases comprise a fraction
of the paid database market, yet now constitute as much as a quarter of
all database usage. The database market, in short, is ripe for open
source cannibalization.
Most of that market is composed of proprietary databases like Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server.
Yet despite what appears to be reasonable growth, all is not well in database land -- at least, not if you're a legacy vendor.
Growing slower all the time
As Gartner highlights in a recent research report, open source databases now consume 25 percent of relational database usage.
Why should we care? Because, according to Gartner, "The
potential impact of [open source databases] capturing workloads that
would otherwise go to commercial products will manifest in declining
growth rates for the latter."
In fact, it's already happening. Though the proprietary RDBMS market
grew at a sluggish 5.4 percent in 2014, the open source database market
grew 31 percent to hit $562 million.
Think about that: $562 million in revenue but 25 percent overall
database usage in a market worth more than $40 billion. What will happen
to that $40 billion when open source databases claim 50 percent market
share in terms of database use?
Physician, eat thyself
The database vendors need an answer -- soon. A quick look at DB-Engines, which ranks database popularity, suggests that this trend toward open source will only continue:
With
very few exceptions, open source databases -- both relational and NoSQL
-- are chewing into proprietary database popularity.
This isn't a development a vendor can combat through
ever-tightening account control, not given the rising importance of
developers. As Gartner highlights, "Developer choice, an increasingly
important determinant of product usage, often occurs without reference
to corporate standard preferences, as usage increasingly falls outside
of IT organizations."
While it used to be the case that picking open source
databases was a trade-off of robustness and performance for developer
convenience, that's no longer the case according to Gartner for open
source RDBMSes: "Open source ... RDBMSes have matured and today can be
considered by information leaders, DBAs and application development
management as a standard infrastructure choice for a large majority of
new enterprise applications."
Assuming the same happens in the NoSQL market -- a very good
assumption-- the hitherto indomitable proprietary database market looks
ripe for open source cannibalization. Mickos had the vision, but
today's open source database leaders will really get to live it.
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