The Relational Database Turns 50. Will Market Consolidation Spoil the Party?

Gartner warns that a consolidating vendor landscape will reduce choice

Welcome to the Cloud Database Report. I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist who worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. This blog and free newsletter are independent, unsponsored, and not affiliated with my current role as a VP at Method Communications.

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Credit: Pixabay

Pop open the champagne — the relational database is 50 years old!

It’s been five decades since IBM launched its System R research project to develop a prototype relational database management system, based on the work of IBM computer scientist E.F. Codd.

To put that into context, the relational database has been around longer than DOS and Windows, the Web browser, Linux, Google, cloud computing, the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter/X. And the RDBMS just keeps going.

Today, the world’s largest businesses use relational databases to manage financial transactions, customer information, inventory, health records, product sales, and much more. And they use relational DBs to analyze terabytes and petabytes of data generated by all of those apps.

In addition to its remarkable track record supporting mission-critical business processes — in split seconds and with five 9s availability — the relational database has evolved with generations of tech architectures, from minicomputers to client/server to the cloud and now the emerging AI stack. And it has adapted to accommodate many different data types, including objects, spatial data, documents, and graphs.

Other database models — object-oriented, graph, document, vector, etc. — have taken their place alongside relational, but they haven’t knocked it off its pedestal. Seven of the Top 10 databases in the DB-Engines ranking of database popularity are relational.

How do you explain the RDBMSs longevity? Its keys to success include a well-understood model of tables, columns, and rows; standards-based programming with SQL and other languages; and the ability to support both OLTP and analytics. 

I have more to say about the relational’s golden anniversary in a column that was just published on Oracle.com. It’s one of the first in a new series of blogs that I will writing there.

See the full article here: “Secrets to 50 years of relational database success: innovation, evolution”

Is market consolidation coming?

The database and broader data market seem to be growing nicely, but keep your eyes on the road ahead for red brake lights. Gartner is advising that the vendor landscape could consolidate by 40% by next year. I repeat: 40% consolidation by 2025!

That’s a jolting prediction. And it must strike fear into the hearts of the many up-and-coming vendors that are trying to break into the database and analytics market.

If you missed Gartner’s dire assessment, you’re probably not alone. It was easily overlooked in the “Strategic Planning Assumptions” section of Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems. Here’s exactly how Gartner put it.

“By 2025, 55% of IT will adopt data ecosystems, consolidating the vendor landscape by 40%, thereby reducing cost while reducing choice.” — Gartner

(You can download the Gartner report from Google Cloud and other database providers who have licensed it for distribution.)

Now, before you hit the panic button, it’s important to know that predictions of this kind of market consolidation aren’t new. Henny Pennys have been warning that the sky is falling for years.

See this headline from 2020: “Consolidation of the Database Market and What It Means for Your Data Warehouse”

And this one from 2018: “Database Market Consolidation Is Inevitable”

At some point, the soothsayers are bound to be right. Case in point: Private equity firms are said to be circling around MariaDB, which provides a commercial open-source database. Related to this, Microsoft has disclosed plans to retire its Azure Database for MariaDB next year, as reported by ChannelE2E.

So I’m not dismissing the warning signals. It does feel as if the broader data market is getting a bit crowded.

Here’s how analyst Tony Baer put it in his 2024 year-ahead column on SiliconAngle:

“On the database side, we see a flight to safety,” Baer wrote. “There is scant appetite for new database startups in a landscape that still counts hundreds of engines, but shows the top 10 most popular ones remaining largely stable.”

One outcome of this flight to safety could be an increase in database migrations to the well established cloud platforms. My next column to be published by Oracle will be on this topic. I will share it here in the Cloud Database Report once it’s live.

News at a glance

As usual, I have a few industry developments to share.

• Codified, a data-governance startup, announced it has secure $4 million in seed funding. This is interesting to me because I know Codified’s CEO Yatharth Gupta from his days as an SVP at Singlestore. Also, two of Codified’s investors are Bob Muglia, formerly of Snowflake and Microsoft, and Shireesh Thota, the newly promoted corporate VP of databases at Microsoft — both of whom I’ve interviewed in the past. I will be watching Codified with interest.

• InfoWorld reports that Google Cloud is adding vector support to all of its database offerings.

• Here’s the breaking news from Google Cloud itself: “BigQuery and AlloyDB hit major milestone with AI-enabled updates”

• Are you familiar with Tessell, which provides database as a service for Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server? I worked at Oracle years ago with Tessell co-founder and CEO Bala Kuchibhotla. I’ve been talking to the team at Tessell and plan to provide an update on the company’s progress sometime soon.

Finally, here’s my last post in case you missed it.

The $100B Database Market Is on Track to Surpass 1,000 DBMSs

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