Mar 2008
Turning the Tables?

The enterprise adoption of open source has been led by Linux on the operating system tier, Apache and JBoss on the middleware tier, and MySQL and PostgreSQL on the database tier. Many open source proponents cite the database as an example of an open source software success story, assuming that the adoption of open source databases has been at the expense of proprietary incumbents Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Open source databases have been widely deployed, but is that adoption at the expense of, or in addition to, existing deployments? How significant has the impact of open source software been in the database market? Are open source databases being deployed to support mission-critical applications, or simply to cut costs on less important and compute-intensive workloads? Will open source databases prove to be the ideal data store technology for Web applications and service-oriented architecture deployments?

This report examines the adoption of open source database software to date and explores what barriers the open source vendors have to overcome to mount a meaningful long-term challenge to the big three. The report also assesses the response of the incumbent vendors to the open source challenge, and includes a survey assessing the attitudes toward open source and proprietary databases among executives responsible for the procurement of database management systems.

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