by Angela Guess
Companies now have more choices than ever when it comes to databases. A new article reports, “About a decade ago, competition in the database market seemed to be winding down. Consolidation had taken out ASK, Tandem, and Informix as independent vendors, and Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, in that order, were ensconced as the largest commercial relational vendors. MySQL, meanwhile, was growing to be the one prominent option in the open source realm. The market share picture isn’t that different today, yet the database world is alive with competition, evolving features, emerging applications, and promising new possibilities.”
It continues, “Whether the database management challenge is data warehousing, data analysis, or transactional processing behind applications, there’s new functionality to consider as well as upstart vendors and open source movements that are stimulating the incumbents. That’s a good thing; it’s boosting performance expectations and preventing even the largest, most entrenched vendors from sitting back, content to collect licensing fees without delivering true breakthrough improvements.”
The article adds, “Database vendors shouldn’t rest because their customers are under constant pressure. IT organizations are being pressed to do more with less, so they want incumbent databases to require less keep-the-lights-on administration. Beyond these basics, IT groups are also facing new challenges, such as the need to cope with huge data growth and new types of data flowing from digital marketing initiatives, social and mobile interactions, sensors, Web log files, and more.”
photo credit: superwebdeveloper
