Open Source Databases
There were a couple stories in this week's Infoworld on open source databases, specifically MySQL and Postgres, that I thought worth mentioning. This first was an infomercial-esque piece on why Microsoft and IBM's database product managers felt OSS db's weren't any good. It didn't seem like a story so much as a rebuttal to the second article. The second article was written by the Test Center's Maggie Bigg's - she concludes that while the OSS crowd might not be enterprise ready now, they are certainly capable of saving companies money on midsized data sets. She also felt that their broad distribution by Linux vendors, Mac, and now Novell will really jumpstart adoption.
It was only a few years ago that MS' database group was chasing everyone's tail-lights, losing the enterprise sales but making it up on the volume of workgroup applications, where it's lower cost and easier purchasing process were very appealing. The irony here is that those are the attributes of OSS db's that are now glaring in Microsoft's rear-view mirror.
The MSSQL/DB2 product managers are certainly correct that their products do more, but I'd like to see infoworld (or maybe Gartner) be more specific about when or how often the commercial db's make sense. Or to even quantify it - that would be a scary thing. What percentage of database applications actually use the exotic XML integration, distributed transactions, replication, OLAP/data warehousing, clustering, java stored procedures, etc. that commercial vendors rely on to differentiate themselves? My own experience suggests under 10%.
11:48:33 AM 
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