AWS's Long, Steady Climb to the Top of the Database Market
In Gartner's ranking, AWS has passed Microsoft as the database market share leader
Welcome to the Cloud Database Report! I’m John Foley, a tech writer and long-time journalist who formerly worked at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. If you received this newsletter, you’re a subscriber (thank you!) or someone forwarded it to you. Subscriptions are free.
“And we have a new leader!”
Those are the words of Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal when he revealed that AWS had passed Microsoft to become the database market share leader.
You may have missed that bit of news a few weeks ago. The changing of the guard at the top of the database market didn’t receive a lot of media coverage. But is anyone surprised? AWS has been gradually moving up in Gartner’s annual ranking over the past 10 years—from 7th place in 2013 to 1st place last year. Along the way, it passed InterSystems, Teradata, SAP, IBM, Oracle, and now Microsoft.
AWS’s ascendence can be seen in two Gartner reports. In December, Gartner published its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, which featured AWS at the apex of its Leaders quadrant. More recently, in April, Gartner released its market share ranking for 2022 (below), which shows AWS moving past Microsoft and into the top spot for the first time.
How AWS did it
AWS’s rise to No. 1 can be attributed, in my view, to a handful of advantages: Its variety of databases; its leadership in the cloud; a long menu of other infrastructure services; scale; and a non-stop product development pipeline.
AWS offers a dozen databases, including three relational systems (Aurora, RDS, Redshift), NoSQL (DynamoDB), in-memory (ElastiCache), as well as wide-column, graph, time series, and ledger databases.
Which is to say that AWS has thrown its efforts behind the concept of purpose-built databases. The company now has a database for most types of workloads—transactions, analytics, ERP, CRM, document management, recommendations, web commerce, geospatial, caching, and more.
You can see the full list of AWS databases here.
The fact that AWS is the world’s leading cloud service provider obviously works in its favor in the database market. Among customers already using AWS for one reason or another, AWS is automatically on the short list for database services as well.
And there’s the benefit of integration with AWS’s menu of other cloud infrastructure services: compute, storage, networking, security, ML, etc. That integration is not always fast or easy—as Gartner notes—but it’s there.
What’s more, AWS is able to support the petabyte-scale and exabyte-scale workloads of global companies. Here are a few recent examples, as cited in the company’s Q1 2023 financial results:
Southwest Airlines selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider for a large-scale modernization as part of the airline’s long-term plan to optimize airline operations, streamline infrastructure costs, and provide a more seamless and enjoyable travel experience to customers.
Zurich Insurance Group is moving its enterprise information technology infrastructure, including 1,000 applications over the next three years, to AWS to deliver new digital customer experiences and drive automation at scale.
S&P Global and AWS announced a multiyear strategic collaboration to extend the delivery of advanced, secure, cloud-based services to more than 100,000 of S&P Global’s government and enterprise customers in 43 countries around the world.
For more on AWS’s ability to scale to millions, billions, and trillions, see my recap of CEO Adam Selipsky’s re:Invent keynote.
Another factor working in AWS’s favor is its rapid-fire product development. In the month of May, I counted 28 AWS database-related product announcements. At that rate, you’re talking about hundreds of platform improvements annually.
One other thing. Some of the credit goes to AWS CTO Werner Vogels, who continues to be an architect of how the pieces work together. It’s interesting to note that one of Vogels’ mentors years ago was Microsoft researcher and Turing Award winner Jim Gray, who was tragically lost at sea when his sailboat disappeared on a solo voyage in 2007. Both men have been hugely influential in database development. (Here’s an article on Jim Gray that was written by my friend Charlie Babcock when we were both at InformationWeek.)
Winners and losers
As you can see from the Gartner chart, competition in the database market has been and continues to be a rollercoaster ride. The winners in 2022—companies that moved up relative to the competition—include Huawei, Snowflake, Databricks, Progress, Datastax, Redis Labs, EnterpriseDB, Neo4j, SingleStore, and Cockroach Labs.
[Aerospike, Tigergraph, and MariaDB moved up as well, but with a caveat: They were bumped up because two legacy vendors—Actian and Tmax—were dropped by Gartner.]
Companies that slipped in the ranking, or got bypassed, include Microsoft, Teradata, Cloudera, Fujitsu, Broadcom, HPE, Couchbase, Hitachi, Software AG, and Vertica.
One of the big movers is Snowflake, which has climbed more than 20 places (!) in six years and broke into the Gartner’s top 10 last year. In contrast, Software AG has been in steady decline—its graph over the past 10 years looks like a downhill ski slope.
Gartner’s market share ranking requires a leap of faith in its methodology. The research firm did not share revenue estimates or percentages to back up its placement of vendors. It’s possible that info is available to paying clients, of which I am not one.
Market share not a popularity contest
Gartner’s spaghetti-bowl chart is one way to think about the database market. Another is DB-Engines’ popularity ranking, which is based on an idiosyncratic formula that includes quirky things like the number of Tweets and job listings that mention a particular database.
What’s noteworthy is that none of the top 10 databases in DB-Engines’ ranking are from AWS. Which underscores that there are lots of ways to assess the database market, and AWS doesn’t win in all cases.
In fact, I can think of many other lenses through which we might view the database market. Consider these:
Best new databases
Fastest-growing cloud databases
Databases with the best architecture for data distribution
Top platforms for data analysis
Most secure and resilient enterprise databases
Easiest-to-use databases
Self-managing autonomous databases
In short, biggest is not always best, especially when revenue is the measure. Performance, scale, reliability, openness, and the ability to run across multiple clouds are more important to many IT pros. And with 900 database systems in the market, the competition continues.
John Foley is VP of Content and Thought Leadership with Method Communications. The Cloud Database Report is independently published and unaffiliated with Method, and the views here are my own. I welcome you to connect with me on LinkedIn.