Open-Source Database Software

What is Open-Source Database Software?

Traditionally, databases have been proprietary tools provided by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and a number of other smaller vendors. Over recent years though, and especially for new projects, open source databases have steadily grown in maturity and importance.

As these databases become adopted by more and more companies for large-scale enterprise projects, there has been a concomitant rise in the availability of skilled DBAs, with extensive knowledge of these platforms to be able to assist with mission-critical deployments.

What are the reasons driving this growth?

In addition to the obvious cost savings, open source database software have now reached feature parity with their proprietary cousins.

Just as important though, the open source model provides a less obvious benefit: Open source products have a wealth of data available through the community. It is much easier to find out how to tweak an open source database to achieve better scaling or, what the limitations are, and how to work around them.

This kind of information is typically not available for proprietary databases where messaging around capabilities is tightly controlled by the vendor.