OSBC: The State of the Open Source Database Market

An interesting panel in an area that is really heating up. The panel consisted of participants from 451 Group (moderator Matthew Aslett), EnterpriseDB (Andy Astor), Ingres (Roger Burkhardt), Oracle (Ken Jacobs) and MySQL (Zack Urlocker). This was the last panel I attended last night, so I’m going from memory this morning. This is clearly an area where Open Source companies are competing very effectively against their proprietary counterparts. It’s also an area where the Open Source participants are still figuring out both their long term business models and their niche within the Open Source database ecosystem. There is more inter-Open Source vendor competition here then in almost any other segment IMHO. It’s also clear to me that many of the proprietary vendors still don’t fully grok Open Source. They over estimate the importance of gratis and underestimate the importance of libre. I think that’s going to be a mistake long term.

–jeremy