Share this article:

What can you get from Open Source DB ?

For the last 20 years the DBMS market is driven (over 80% market share) by 3 majors Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. Today, Oracle is the most advanced and complete existing RDBMS, but associated cost are so high that it disqualifies them especially for SMEs market segment.

# Open Source offer

What alternative then ? well… Open Source products like MySQL or PostgreSQL launched their first release more than 20 years ago. And ? so what ? not so much, at least from a 22,000 feet view. But impact is real, even if it is quite difficult to measure the real level of usage. Also, it takes a while to get mindset moving and practitioners trained. Anyway, at the end figures are clear, it didn’t shake the market, dinosaurs are still leading.

# Game changer

So what could shake it ? Cloud ! … according to Gartner Inc, “The Future of the Database Market Is the Cloud”, “By 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, with only 5% ever considered for repatriation to on-premises. This trend will largely be due to databases used for analytics, and the SaaS model“.

One thing fore sure, DBMS majors in the Cloud are still extremely expensive. From there, resistance organised itself delivering highly innovative Open Source DBMS (OSDBMS) integrated as Services by Cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba…). What does it change ? it changes everything !

Even if most popular DBMS remains the majors and are also Services on Cloud platform, we estimate that today more than 70% of new in-house applications are built on OSDBMS.

# OSDBMS Benefits

OSDBMS is incredibly vast and is growing extremely fast through communities collaborative work. We can split current OSDBMS products in 5 main types of DBs: Relational DB (original type), Document DB, Graphical DB, Key Value Store DB and Wide Column Store DB.

OSDBMS provide agility, speed and flexibility at a very affordable acquisition and maintenance cost. They present interesting characteristics that enlarge the DBs scope of work.

Data Migration
A set of data pieces would be stored in places that can be accessed frequently without any inconvenience.

Backup & Recovery
Data loss is a major risk for companies. Traditional file system management needs to backup data periodically, but by using OSDBMS, data backup would automatic make it easier.

Data Redundancy
It integrates multiple files in one platform which reduces the chance of data duplicity to almost zero.

Data sharing
Multiple users share data, each having their dedicated access rights to reach the DB up to a defined level. Only the DBA has the full access.

Search Capability

Search speed of an OSDBMS is usually very fast and produces quick results. There are numerous queries users may ask about the data.

Data Consistency
A OSDBMS would control its redundancy and duplicity by storing data in just 1 database, ensuring proper data consistency.

Best OSDBMS you absolutely need to consider:

Relational DB => MariaDB > PostgreSQL > MySQL

Document DB => MongoDB > Couchbase > ArangoDB

Graphical DB => Neo4j > OrientDB > GraphDB

Value Store DB => Redis > Memcahed > Hazelcast

Wide Column Store => Cassandra > Hbase

Hope we convinced you to explore more on OSDBMS opportunities. We will be happy to tell you more, contact us for a free-talk.

— posted by the Open Cloud Society content team

— Sources:

Open Could Society people (thanks to you guys !)

The Register, full article here

MariaDB, white paper here

DB engine, website

Gartner, full article here