Trends in open source databases

A recent study by Gartner informs that open source RDBMS has matured and can be used to replace commercial RDBMS systems to save on the Total Cost of Ownership(TCO). The study finds that open source RDBMS can be considered as the infrastructure of choice for  new applications by information leaders. Even when commercial DBMSs use the cloud model or platform as a service, open source DBMS systems offer significant cost savings.

The Gartner study finds, that Open Source DBMSs have reached around 25% of the target market.  Though they are mostly used for transactional systems, significant usage is also in data warehousing projects. Compared to Commercial DBMSs, open source DBMSs are growing at a faster rate in revenue terms and in market share terms.

Professor Sudarshan, IIT Bombay, a well known researcher and an author in the area of database systems, says, “Open source databases, in particular PostgreSQL and MySQL, have established themselves as reliable platforms, and have had numerous features added in recent years that havemade them serious candidates even for applications that require high availability. I would say that the one key area where they are behind commercial databases is in executing complex queries on large data, and on support for some performance related features such as materialized views."

Sudarshan says that while commercial databases continue to rule in the ERP space, and in some other mission critical and high performance enterprise applications, for applications that do not require complex queries, and where performance is not perceived as an issue, open source databases are being preferred.

A Gartner study finds that open source RDBMS products have matured in availability of DBA skills, availability of DBA tools and near equality of RDBMS functionality. The Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) was higher in Open Source DBMSs when the skills were not adequately available and the management tools were not adequately available. However, with availability of tools and skills, the Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) has truly come down.

Gartner has the following recommendations to make :

1. Acquire an Open Source RDBMS in test environment to build expertise.

2. Begin to replace Commercial RDBMSs with Open Source RDBMSs in less critical applications.

3. Evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Open Source DBMSs for replacing Commercial DBMSs

Says Professsor Sudarshan, “The database research group at IIT Bombay has been carrying out internationally recognized research in several areas of database systems, including query optimization, query evaluation, and performance optimization of database applications. Several of the innovations developed by the group have been prototyped on PostgreSQL.   PostgreSQL is also the database of choice at IIT Bombay for teaching SQL, as well as for teaching database internals; student projects in the database implementation course are usually based on adding features at the PostgreSQL source code level.”

Each organization has to take its own technology decision. In taking such a decision, the Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) is a factor; availability of skills and tools is a factor; functional completeness of the chosen product also must be considered. Commercial DBMSs are strong on availability of skills or availability of tools. Commercial DBMSs are also strong on functional completeness. However, commercial DBMSs compare far poorly on the Total Cost of Ownership(TCO).

Professor Sudarshan, IIT Bombay points, “Interestingly, open source data management systems,

such as Hadoop, Hive and HBase, have found significant success at the high end of the spectrum, for processing data on massively parallel systems with tens to thousands of nodes and large amount of data. These systems are not full-fledged databases, but can be used for many transaction processing and decision support requirements. Although there are commercial database systems in this space, they are very expensive, and open source data management systems have come to dominate in this segment.”

The Spoken Tutorial project at IIT Bombay, in keeping with trends, is promoting Open Source RDBMSs in a big way. As is well known, the Spoken Tutorials are set of audio video tutorials, in  many languages, for teaching various software, free of cost.  The Spoken Tutorial project at IIT Bombay teaches Open Source RDBMSs in two ways. Firstly, there is a course on MySQL along with PHP. Besides this there is a separate course on LibreOffice Base. Efforts are on to create separate course focused on core part of Libre Office Base. Very clearly, there is recognition of growing importance of Open Source RDBMS at IIT Bombay.

In a scenario, where products comparable on functionality and availability of skills and tools, are so divergently priced on Total Cost of Ownership(TCO), there is need for introspection, so that the  decision is based on the best available information.

Of course, if Open Source DBMSs are maturing fast, it would be equally wise to examine the maturity of other Open Source Software, such as programming languages, operating  systems and other applications. Open Source developers must also make effort to close the gap by introducing   functionality, interfaces and tools that make it easier to work with Open Source products.