The persistently high rate of data growth is having a direct impact on the database market. According to IDC the relational database management system (RDBMS) software market grew 14.3 percent last year to $16.5 billion -- not bad for what many considered to be a mature, slow-growing market.
 
Increasing compliance and regulation, the rise in collaboration and information sharing, proliferation of new applications as well as growing use of open source software are fuelling the growth in data and databases.
 
As the amount of data and databases increase so does the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure; spiralling costs and management burdens are becoming real issues for companies of all sizes.
 
Enterprise-sized Headaches
Larger organisations have traditionally had limited database vendor choice due to their high level requirements and scalability demands. The advanced functionality and 24/7 support needed by larger organisations as well as the time, risk and cost of change has led to a conservative approach to trialling or adopting proven lower cost alternatives, such as open source based databases.
 
Another key element to limited adoption of new database technology in the enterprise is vendor lock-in. Many organisations are completely dependent on a vendor for products <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_%28business%29>  and services <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service>  and the move to another vendor, with associated substantial migration costs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_barriers> , real and/or perceived, has prevented any change. Oracle’s choke-hold over 45% of the global database market only goes to demonstrate that it is “better the devil you know” in many cases.
But this is changing. Open source databases can offer a more flexible and lower cost alternative to proprietary databases but have often fallen short when it comes to offering appropriate functionality and support to the enterprise. In a recent survey on open source adoption by Forrester and Unisys, support for open standards amongst respondents was considered very important by 48%, followed by unrestricted use (45%), vendor lock-in avoidance (42%) and using the software without paying a license fee (35%). Substantial cost reductions and flexibility is the main appeal.

Migration Migraines

Reducing TCO is clearly a major driver for companies wanting to break away from inflexible and controlling database vendors but the cost, time and perceived risks of migration can often outweigh the money that can be saved by moving to a new proprietary or open source database platform.
 
The ability to migrate to new systems with minimal risk and downtime as well as a need for support before, during and after is vital and without all of these elements many organisations are being forced to stay with current incumbent vendors. This is where the database trade-off appears. Enterprise customers are being forced to choose between capabilities that they need or compromise on functionality in order to have a lower cost solution.
 
The analyst community cannot seem to agree on whether or not open source in its true form is indeed enterprise-ready. Gartner argues that enterprise wide use of open source in mission-critical systems still remains limited. “There are still many open issues with using an OSS DBMS. These issues include the ability to scale to large, mixed workloads; security; manageability; and technical resources needed for support.” (Donald Feinberg, Gartner - Apr 2007)

What is clear is that the enterprise community is certainly looking at open source and lower cost alternatives but there are still barriers to adoption due to migration risks and limited capabilities.