The big picture in the global database market is changing rapidly. It is an $80B market right now – the largest software market and growing in double digits year over year.
Gartner has recently published the software market revenue numbers for 2021.
In 2021, the revenue for managed cloud services is more than $39B – which means about half of al global DBMS revenue. Have a look at the drastic change since 2017:
Microsoft and AWS have right now about half of the global database market while Oracle have slipped down to having only about one fifth of the overall share. Google have entered for the first time the top 5 while IBM have just lost there 4th position. SAP are out of the top 5.
In terms of database popularity, Oracle are still #1 based on the DB engines rankings:
So, what is new and causing these turbulances?
Google have just announced AlloyDB for PostgreSQL. Compared with standard PostgreSQL, according to Google’s own performance tests, AlloyDB was more than four times faster for transactional workloads, and up to 100 times faster for analytical queries. AlloyDB was also two times faster for transactional workloads than Amazon’s comparable service. This makes AlloyDB a powerful new modernization option for transitioning off of legacy databases. Here are the other offerings from Google Cloud:
The latest from AWS is predominantly around RDS and Redshift (a database based on PostgreSQL). Amazon Redshift RA3 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain) and Africa (Cape Town) regions. Amazon Redshift now offers new enhancements for Audit Logging, which enables faster delivery of logs for analysis by minimizing latency while also adding Amazon CloudWatch as a new log destination. With the latest release, customers can choose to stream audit logs directly to Amazon CloudWatch, which enables customers to perform real-time monitoring. Amazon Redshift now also provides native integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD), which customers can use for authentication and authorization with tools like Microsoft Power BI.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Performance Insights now makes it easier for you to see the database performance metrics for the exact timeframe you want to analyze, by choosing a custom time window within your retention period. Previously, you could only see metrics in Performance Insights by choosing relative time intervals such as the past 1 hour, the past 24 hours, etc. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, MariaDB and MySQL now supports M6i and R6i instances with new instance sizes up to 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB RAM. Also, Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is now generally available.
The latest from Azure is around Change data capture: CDC lets you track all the changes that occur on a database. Though this feature has been available for SQL Server for quite some time, using it with Azure SQL Database is now generally available. When creating a Hyperscale database, you can choose your preferred storage type: read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS), zone-redundant storage (ZRS), or locally redundant storage (LRS) Azure standard storage. The selected storage redundancy option will be used for the lifetime of the database for both data storage redundancy and backup storage redundancy. It is now possible to configure your Azure SQL Database to allow authentication only from Azure Active Directory.
IBM i 7.5, previously know as AS/400, is coming with some “interesting” features. There is a new BOOLEAN data type, the maximum size of a binary radix index is extended, up to 16 TB. Used t be 1.7TB. I do not know many DBAs who enjoy dealing with double digit TB indexes. The Db2 for i SQL Query Engine (SQE) provides a Query Supervisor which enables real-time monitoring of resource consumption by SQL and native queries. There is now a RESTRICT ON DROP attribute that can be added or removed using the ALTER TABLE (SQL) statement (ALTER TABLE TABLE_NAME ADD RESTRICT ON DROP;). When RESTRICT ON DROP is added, nobody will be allowed to delete or drop that file. Even users with *ALLOBJ user special authority will not be allowed to delete the file.
The only change I am aware of in Oracle Database Release 21c, Version 21.5 are the new AE Analytic Views. AE stands for “All Edition”. Each new AE analytic view corresponds to an existing non-AE analytic view. AE views have the same columns as their non-AE counterparts, plus a column that displays the name of the application edition where the editioned object is defined. For the complete list of changes in Oracle 21, check this link.
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