Why Open‑Source Databases Are Booming: Key Takeaways from Percona Live

At the Percona Live conference in Austin, Percona founder and CEO Peter Zaitsev presented his view on the current state of open‑source databases.

Recent market events illustrate massive change: IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, Salesforce bought MuleSoft, Microsoft purchased GitHub, MongoDB’s market grew three‑fold to $7.7 billion, and Cloudera merged with Hortonworks.

The number of publicly listed open‑source companies has risen from five in 2014 to twenty in 2016 and now reaches forty.

Unicorn companies are adjusting licenses; MongoDB switched to the SSPL license.

Debates continue over whether cloud providers exploit OSS, if DBaaS creates monopolies, and how to protect OSS users’ interests.

Sixty‑nine percent consider open source a strategic priority, with PostgreSQL emerging as the top migration target for proprietary databases.

Adoption reasons for PostgreSQL include cost savings (80 %), avoiding vendor lock‑in (62 %), and a strong community (53 %). Concerns remain about support (54 %), vulnerabilities (41 %), and security/compliance (35 %); 64 % of users solve problems themselves.

The most favored license among respondents is BSD.

Relational databases stay popular: 50 % of surveyed users run databases in public clouds, 70 % of those on AWS; 38 % use DBaaS, and 74 % rely on AWS services. Among companies with over 5,000 employees, 38 % operate multi‑cloud environments.

DBaaS is gaining attention for its convenience, flexibility, multi‑platform support, and cloud‑native capabilities, with Kubernetes becoming the de‑facto standard for managing distributed data centers.

Security, privacy, and compliance are critical for enterprises. Reported incidents rose to 1,903 in 2019 from 1,200 in 2018, with internal errors as the main cause. In the past year, 30 % of companies experienced ongoing data leaks, rising to 60 % over the last five years.

Key points:

Open‑source databases continue strong growth and increasing market adoption.

Tensions rise between users and software vendors.

Cloud providers face growing scrutiny.

Demand for security, simplicity, and scalability keeps rising.

Kubernetes offers a new hope for managing these workloads.