Media Coverages
December 2006
Open Source DBs Move In
By Joe McKendrick
To some observers, the open source model represents a challenge that is shaking up the established order of the commercial database world. Others, however, say its time has yet to come, and open source DBs still only represent a minuscule fraction of the $14-billion annual global database market.
While commercial database vendors continue to pile on the revenues, implementations of open source databases are on the rise - even at enterprise sites. A new survey from the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), conducted by Unisphere Research, finds that 37 percent of enterprise database sites are also running at least one of the major brands of open source databases. Most prevalent is MySQL, now deployed at a third of the surveyed Oracle sites. PostgreSQL is deployed at nine percent of the sites, followed by other leading open source databases, including Ingres, Firebird and Oracle's Berkeley DB.
Open source databases however are more likely to make their mark five to 10 years from now, believes Josh Berkus, PostgreSQL lead in the database technology group at Sun Microsystems and member of the PostgreSQL core team. Currently, commercial database suppliers are being chased upstream, opening up the small business sector to open source databases. "Proprietary vendors have their eyes on the big accounts," Berkus said. "In the long run, some portion of the small accounts will become big accounts; and many of the big accounts will go away. It will take 10 to 15 years for the impact of open source databases to run its course."
While open source databases are becoming more prevalent, they are still at the edge of the enterprise. The IOUG survey finds, for instance, that only 10 percent of open source databases are deployed to support enterprise applications. The most predominant use of open source databases is for specific, single-function systems, followed by custom home-grown applications and Web sites.
Open Source Challenges
Concerns about support, security and available management tools may be holding back open source databases from gaining importance in enterprises. "Issues like these force IT organizations to look at open source databases only for non-mission critical purposes," Vick Vaishnavi, director of product marketing for Blade-Logic, said. "For example, if someone is interested in developing a small in-house data warehouse toolset, an open source database might be a good start for experimenting, understanding the requirements and testing what works for the organization. They could then use that experience to drive the purchase and adoption of a commercial database if the need arises. However, for those scenarios where data protection and data exchange with outside parties are involved - as with most major businesses today - the open source databases just don't provide the confidence level to enable wide level adoption."
The ability to obtain a copy of a database at no cost for test drives is also being subsumed by the commercial database vendors. "The open source vendors have presented a new and interesting set of business models, things we can learn from and use to bring new value to our customers," Robert Shimp, vice president of global technology marketing for Oracle, told DBTA. "That includes things like free products that enable the user to get introduced to a technology - to try it out, deploy it, and then decide later whether they want technical support from the vendor. Oracle is embracing that business model with some of its products, such as our Express Edition."
IBM and Microsoft have also followed suit with lightweight versions of their own relational database systems for small-to-medium businesses. The larger vendors "recognize that the days when you could get a small business to cough up $10,000 for a database license are over," said Sun's Berkus.
Still, Shimp pointed out, open source databases themselves have yet to have a significant impact on the market. "Most of the open source vendors have been around for many, many years," he said. "MySQL has around $35 million in revenue in a $13.8-billion market - less than a quarter of a percentage point of share. In terms of the revenues and the long time they've been in the market, one has to wonder whether there would be a big shift in the offing anytime soon." Plus, he added, the database industry continues to consolidate to three or four major vendors.
Community Role
Two business models are evolving in the open source database space. The PostgreSQL model is similar to Linux, in which a community - regulated by a core committee of experts - maintains and releases new versions. MySQL and Berkeley DB, however, are structured around a dual-licensing approach, in which a single company maintains and releases code and provides support.
Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, a provider of Web development tools and hosting services, chose PostgreSQL over MySQL for its more Linux-like licensing. But, Hoffman said, he could understand why CIOs or CTOs may be nervous about going with a community-based database. "The most concerning thing about PostgreSQL is that there really isn't a company behind it at some level. It's not that it's immature. It's that it's completely community-driven. As a CTO, there's a reassuring idea that maybe we could actually pay somebody at some point to fix an issue. "Still, many see the community approach as a positive aspect to open source. William Hurley, chairman of the Open Management Consortium and CTO of Qlusters, told DBTA that “open source's greatest asset is the large community of users and developers to address various types of issues. A community that actively participates in product planning, testing, and support will eventually commoditize the lion's share of the market."
Hurley added that open source databases do have issues that the community will eventually address. "Many open source implementations of a standard query language are lacking," he said. "Several still need support for sub-selects, foreign key constraints for some table types, and stored procedures. Most feel the implementation of views needs improvement as well." Matthew Zito, chief scientist for GridApp Systems, told DBTA that MySQL, for example, has greatly enhanced its functionality to support standard transactional and OLTP environments. However, he added, open source databases such as MySQL still do not have as much supporting functionality as their commercial counterparts. "Clustering, replication, data movement, and backup and recovery are not as mature as what's available for the more traditional database platforms. There's not the same partner ecosystem as with Oracle or SQL Server."
Job Changes Ahead
Open source databases may also begin to affect the job space with a greater blending between database administrator and developer roles. That's because open source database users are less likely to be willing to put out the money for dedicated administrators, said Joyent’s Hoffman. "When people have Oracle, they have an expensive Oracle support license," he explained. "Those are the companies that will end up having Oracle DBAs in house."
However, he continued, "the weird thing is, when people go open source, they tend not to staff it. They take the attitude of ‘the database really didn't cost anything, it doesn't have to be taken care of.' That doesn't mean no one is tending to PostgreSQL or MySQL databases, Hoffman added. "Once you have a big enough database, and it's important to you, then somebody will need to look after it. What you see in those situations is MySQL and PostgreSQL being attended to by somebody who may be a developer or engineer - not a dedicated DBA. The 'DBA' that tends to look over open source databases tends to be a mixture of programmer, sys admin, designer, developer, and/or engineer - versus the DBA who's gone to a database-specific training course."
"You don't have to be a guru to get MySQL and PostgreSQL going," Bernard Golden, chief executive officer for Navica, and author of Succeeding with Open Source, told DBTA. A large commercial product such as "Oracle is the Ferrari of databases, because it's fast and powerful. But Ferraris are really finicky, you have to tune them, you're always working on them. You have all this stuff you've got to adjust and pay attention to, and functionality many organizations don't need."