Contributed by Daniel Williams
We most likely will not be upending anyone’s world-view if we make the claim that database spend is a big slice of IT’s overall costs, and one that many businesses would love to shrink. Thirty to thirty-five percent is the figure you hear bandied about. Like any other denizens of the tech ecosphere, database vendors have seen their share of competitive disruption and price pressures over the long history (in IT years, anyway) of the RDBMS. But database costs have remained a durable and distinctive feature of most IT operations.
That’s changing, with the increasing adoption by enterprises of open source database management systems like PostgreSQL (aka, for simplicity, Postgres). As these solutions have approached parity with proprietary platforms in terms of performance and functionality, they’ve received a warm welcome from businesses looking to roll back database costs and ease vendor lock-in.