July 14, 2014

21st Century DBMS success and failure

As part of my series on the keys to and likelihood of success, I outlined some examples from the DBMS industry. The list turned out too long for a single post, so I split it up by millennia. The part on 20th Century DBMS success and failure went up Friday; in this one I’ll cover more recent events, organized in line with the original overview post. Categories addressed will include analytic RDBMS (including data warehouse appliances), NoSQL/non-SQL short-request DBMS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NewSQL and Hadoop.

DBMS rarely have trouble with the criterion “Is there an identifiable buying process?” If an enterprise is doing application development projects, a DBMS is generally chosen for each one. And so the organization will generally have a process in place for buying DBMS, or accepting them for free. Central IT, departments, and — at least in the case of free open source stuff — developers all commonly have the capacity for DBMS acquisition.

In particular, at many enterprises either departments have the ability to buy their own analytic technology, or else IT will willingly buy and administer things for a single department. This dynamic fueled much of the early rise of analytic RDBMS.

Buyer inertia is a greater concern.

A particularly complex version of this dynamic has played out in the market for analytic RDBMS/appliances.

Otherwise I’d say: 

The major reasons for DBMS categories to get established in the first place are:

Those same characteristics are major bases for competition among members of a new category, although as noted above behemoth-loyalty can also come into play.

Cool-vs.-weird tradeoffs are somewhat secondary among SQL DBMS.

They’re huge, however, in the non-SQL world. Most non-SQL data managers have a major “weird” factor. Fortunately, NoSQL and Hadoop both have huge “cool” cred to offset it. XML/XQuery unfortunately did not.

Finally, in most DBMS categories there are massive issues with product completeness, more in the area of maturity than that of whole product. The biggest whole product issues are concentrated on the matter of interoperating with other software — business intelligence tools, packaged applications (if relevant to the category), etc. Most notably, the handful of DBMS that are certified to run SAP share a huge market that other DBMS can’t touch. But BI tools are less of a differentiator — I yawn when vendors tell me they are certified for/partnered with MicroStrategy, Tableau, Pentaho and Jaspersoft, and I’m surprised at any product that isn’t.

DBMS maturity has a lot of aspects, but the toughest challenges are concentrated in two main areas:

In particular:

Related links

There have been 1,470 previous posts in the 9-year history of this blog, many of which could serve as background material for this one. A couple that seem particularly germane and didn’t get already get linked above are:

Comments

2 Responses to “21st Century DBMS success and failure”

  1. Paul Johnson on July 16th, 2014 7:18 am

    The point about appliances is especially relevant at present: “appliances are anti-strategic for many buyers, especially ones who demand a smooth path to the cloud.”

    We’ve heard this a lot recently. Appliances seem to be ‘so 2000’!

    In terms of tough challenges, I’d offer query optimisation and (mixed) workload management.

    Neither tend to be sufficiently tested in POCs, partly because of the difficulty in simulating the real world.

    When the rubber hits the road overall analytic DBMS throughput is highly dependant on the optimiser’s ability to generate efficient query plans, plus how the system allocates CPU and IO resource amongst competing users/applications.

  2. Judging opportunities | Strategic Messaging on July 21st, 2014 12:00 am

    […] 21st Century DBMS industry successes and failures […]

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