At the end of November, Gartner released a report on the growing maturity of open source databases. Since their last report, which was about a year ago, they noticed a growing interest in open source databases plus an increase in the use of open source databases within production environments. To me, this last part is the one that is most interesting. It seems that we now have a key indicator of the success and staying power of open source databases.
Why should open source database use in production environments be a key indicator of success? Well, most people are quite wary of what goes into production environments regardless of how mission-critical the environment is. Production environments must be reliable, secure, and perform well (just to name a few things). Downtime (to varying degrees) is not acceptable and costs businesses money. As more businesses (meaning more than bleeding-edge technology companies) put open source databases into production environments, the open source database software gets validated as a real player in the industry. And, I say its about time. Additionally, due to the lower TCO of open source databases, compared to proprietary RDBMS vendors, we will only see this trend swing up.