Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Complete the 2021 Open Source Data Management Software Survey to share your knowledge and experience, and help inform the open source database community.

In 2020 we ran our second Open Source Data Management Software Survey. This resulted in some interesting data on the state of the open source database market. 

Some key statistics:

• 41% of buying decisions are now made by architects, giving them significant power over software adoption within a company.
• 81% of respondents gave cost savings as the most important reason for adoption. In this challenging economic climate, many companies are actively avoiding vendor license costs and lock-in.
• 82% of respondents reported at least a 5% database footprint growth over the last year, with 62% reporting more significant growth and 12% growing over 50%.
• Although promoted as a cheap and convenient alternative, cloud costs can spiral, with 22% of companies spending more on cloud hosting than planned.

To see how the landscape has changed over the last (turbulent) year, we are pleased to announce the launch of our third annual Open Source Data Management Software Survey. 

The final results will be 100% anonymous and made freely available via Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA).

Access to Accurate Market Data is Important

There are millions of open source projects currently running, and most are dependent on databases. 

Accurate data helps people track the popularity of different databases, and see how and where these databases are running successfully. 

The information helps people build better software and take advantage of shifting trends. It also helps businesses understand industry direction and make informed decisions on the software and services they choose.

We want to help developers, architects, DBAs, and any other users choose the best database or tool for their business, and understand how and where to deploy it. 

How Can You Help This Survey Succeed?

Firstly, we would love you to complete the survey and share your insight into current trends and new developments in open source database software. 

Secondly, we hope you will share this survey with other people who use open source database software and encourage them to contribute.

The more responses we receive, the more useful this data will be to the community. If there is anything we missed or you would like to ask in the future, we welcome your feedback.

The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete. 

Click here to complete the survey!

At our recent Percona Live ONLINE we announced the release of the 2020 Open Source Data Management Software Survey results. 

This year, we wanted to build upon the data we collected in 2019 and continue to monitor the open source industry’s pulse. The 2020 survey was perhaps reflective of the wider world environment, as companies indicated a desire to consolidate their database infrastructure and software, avoid risk, and manage costs.

We asked a number of new questions, as well as comparing 2019 data. One of the headline findings is that database footprints and Database as a Service (DBaaS) continues to grow, but that many companies are facing unexpected cloud bills.

According to the results, the cost of cloud computing was flagged as a problem for many companies, with 22% of organizations facing additional unplanned costs from their cloud providers.

The share of companies using DBaaS increased to 45% of respondents compared to 40% the previous year. More than half of large companies (56%) indicated that they use DBaaS, and, in-line with the trend of companies looking to mitigate their risk, around half of the total large company category used more than one DBaaS service.

The survey also revealed a number of other interesting data points:

Decisions on open source database choice are centralizing

• Architects are now the primary group in charge of making database deployment decisions, according to 41% of respondents.
• The next group is developers with 26%. So, although many developers remain responsible for their organizations’ technology choices, this is starting to consolidate based on the need to manage support and management overheads.

 

 

Database footprints continue to grow

• 82% of organizations saw their database footprint grow more than 5% per year.
• For 12% of organizations, the volume of data they held doubled or more in twelve months.

 

 

 

Upgrading cloud instances is a common occurrence

• Around 28% required two to three upgrades, while 21% had more than ten upgrades.
• Just 12% of organizations made no changes to their instances.

 

 

 

Cloud spending and planning gave mixed results

• Around 22% found that their cloud spending was above expected, while 60% found their cloud spending was about right. For 17%, their cloud spend was lower than expected.

 

 

 

What keeps you up at night?

• This year, we dug deeper into the issues that companies face in their environments and their biggest database management concerns. When asking, ‘what keeps you up at night?’ the most significant issues flagged were downtime (59%) and performance (51%), along with the concern of fixing emergency issues (35%).
• Performance issues were by far the biggest experienced issue for nearly three-quarters of respondents at 74%, with unplanned downtime impacting 45%.

Given the negative impact that performance issues and downtime has on businesses, this reiterates how crucial it is to ensure that your databases are correctly configured and optimized.

Huge thanks to everyone who gave their input and helped contribute to the success of this project. 

Visit our website to view the full 2020 results and see a comparison with 2019 figures.