Where the Database Market Goes From Here – tecosystems

Excerpt from a timely DBMS market dynamics reality check

"By necessity, most of the major emergent non-relational database platforms of the last decade – projects such as Cassandra, Hadoop, MongoDB or Redis – were specialized in their design. In order to compete with the incumbent general purpose relational database platforms, their focus was asymmetric. Of all of the technology categories, database buyers have perhaps the least tolerance for risk. Which means that to justify using something other than the tried and true relational database technologies that had evolved and been improved over decades, alternatives couldn’t just be a little bit faster or a little bit more accessible: they had to be an order of magnitude improvement or more.

This, plus their built-from-scratch nature, inevitably produced a host of new database software that was highly differentiated from the traditional relational databases in approach, scale and function. Which is how we ended up with a database market composed of half a dozen or more relatively distinct categories.

Inevitably, however, these specialized platforms will seek to become less specialized over time. Much as lightweight, developer–friendly MySQL steadily added features such as stored procedures and triggers due to enterprise demand, many of today’s vertical non-relational stores will trend back towards their general purpose, relational ancestors."

Where the Database Market Goes From Here – tecosystems