{"id":52927,"date":"2022-08-26T17:42:19","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T17:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/?p=3992167"},"modified":"2022-08-26T17:42:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T17:42:19","slug":"why-the-database-market-keeps-growing-bigger-and-stranger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=52927","title":{"rendered":"Why the database market keeps growing bigger (and stranger)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cloud
Image: ArtemisDiana\/Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Quick! Name a technology category that has nearly 400 different options<\/a> vying for your attention; that pulled in over $80 billion in revenue last year but is actually accelerating<\/a> in its growth rate; that, decades into its existence, still spawns startups with seemingly bottomless amounts of venture funding<\/a>; and that drove the most job listings<\/a> of any programming language last year. If you guessed \u201cdatabase,\u201d you\u2019d be right.<\/p>\n

Why is this decades-old market so incredibly hot right now? Even as database bearers like Oracle see growth slow, the category is booming. As I\u2019ve written<\/a>, a big reason is cloud, but the bigger reason is simply that data keeps growing in importance to every enterprise, with diverse, unstructured data giving birth to new databases to manage it all.<\/p>\n

Evolution meets revolution<\/h2>\n

This isn\u2019t supposed to be how markets work. Product categories rise and then tend to dwindle over time, replaced by other things. For example, Microsoft minted billions in the operating system (OS) market, but today we don\u2019t really care much about the OS.<\/p>\n

On the desktop, things like ChromeOS have made it clear that it\u2019s the browser\/web that matters most, and on the server, businesses have increasingly been thinking in terms of serverless.<\/p>\n

SEE: Cheat sheet: How to become a database administrator (free PDF)<\/a> (TechRepublic)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Or remember when app servers, enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise content management (ECM) were hot new markets? Companies still depend on these products, or some variant of them, but they\u2019re not considered growth markets.<\/p>\n

Databases arguably should be the same. Relational databases were born in the early 1970s, and we had Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM spin up massive businesses to sell and support them. We should be seeing this market now entering its end, but we\u2019re not.<\/p>\n

While these vendors have seen their database revenue growth slow, the market as a whole has done anything but. Some of their customers are increasingly flirting with PostgreSQL, but even more are turning to cloud databases. Some are even taking on both, with AWS and other cloud giants offering managed PostgreSQL services.<\/p>\n

There has also been a profound and sustained rise in so-called \u201cNoSQL\u201d databases<\/a>. While I like the trend, I don\u2019t particularly like it because databases like MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, Neo4j, DynamoDB, Redis, and others aren\u2019t being embraced because of what they aren\u2019t, but rather for what they are \u2014 flexible, horizontally scalable and able to manage the explosion in unstructured data.<\/p>\n

Indeed, relational databases, with the prominent exception of PostgreSQL, have declined relative to non-relational databases over the last nine years, including over the past year, as measured by DB-Engines<\/a> (as illustrated here<\/a>).<\/p>\n