Quest Product experts, Julie Hyman, Pini Dibask and Rick Schiller discuss why Oracle databases still dominate the market

We are seeing some customers who are moving to other open source platforms, such as Postgres and MySQL. It's actually a huge demand right now for new open source databases. It's mainly about reducing the licensing costs of Oracle. However, we are still seeing that Oracle is dominating the database market. Even according to DB-Engine, it's still the most popular database in the industry. I think even DB-Engine shows that there is a growth trend of popularity of Oracle Database. So the answer is, I think it's mixed. Some customers see open source databases as a good alternative in some cases. But I think that they will never be able to replace all the high-end enterprise capabilities of Oracle Database, which are related to security and performance and scalability. So I think Oracle is here to stay. But we definitely see some customers who are moving to open source databases, such as Postgres, MySQL. And in some cases, it's also other NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, especially when it comes to address changes which are related to scalability of the data and the flexibility of the data. But again, Oracle did a great job in managing those challenges. So Oracle added features like sharding and JSON. So I think Oracle did a great job. But we are still seeing some customers who are moving to alternatives. And just to add to that, I think that the reason why they want to move, a lot of them, as you mentioned, Pini, was the licensing costs. They're trying to get to a lower cost licensing. And I think that's also why, even if they're staying on Oracle, you're seeing them move to the cloud. Because if you're not going to move off the engine, how can you start to get some of those costs back? How can you start to save? And Cloud is a great way, with those managed environments, to do that. So that's another huge trend, besides migration, even for those staying on Oracle, is moving into the Oracle Cloud and trying to get, again, that savings the same way. With One of the things I'm seeing is that large enterprises are considering moves to open source databases. I hear a lot of people talking about it, but not as many people moving right now. So the task of uplifting and moving existing enterprise application is not a simple task. So people are going now through the due diligence and looking at and exploring those options. Postgres, MariaDB, they've both added Oracle capabilities or compatibility type capabilities that are trying to entice people to move away. But the challenge of moving those enterprise applications is still significant. What I think we're starting to see more than anything right now is people exploring these open source databases for their new applications. That's a much easier place for people to start is with a different platform that's maybe meant to meet a slightly different need than you would expect from your typical OLTP database. Yeah, I would completely agree. I think that the folks who are looking at open source-- while migration is always an interesting topic, it's a hot topic, migration's difficult. It's not as easy as it sounds, even when there's PL/SQL compatibility in these other databases. And so the best place for them to start that they're finding was with new applications, maybe not mission-critical applications, so they can build up that skill set, build up the tool set, and then they'll be on that platform. And then when they're ready to go and migrate from Oracle when maybe the Oracle licensing is more favorable for them to do that, then they feel like they'll have an alternative. Exactly. In fact, according to Gartner, by the end of this year, 70% of new in-house applications will be developed on open source databases. So definitely, as both Rick and Julie mentioned, it's more common for new in-house applications and less about traditional, high-end, mission-critical applications, because as both mentioned, the migration process is a very complex project. So we're seeing more cases for new applications and not for existing applications where people use open source databases. On the flip side of that, though, I have seen more than a few customers-- maybe just a few customers who have actually decided to try to migrate one of their most complicated applications to an open source, to a Postgres or to a MariaDB, that has some level of compatibility. The act of doing that, I think, is meant to really flesh out what are all of the challenges. If we can make it work with one of our largest, most challenging applications, then we can make it work with everything else. That's a pretty rare thing. I've seen a few customers who have big ones who are trying to do that, because they are really looking at how can they go all in on doing this. And that really is one of the routes forward. So you can go with I'm just going to start with something new, you can take one of your simpler applications and try to move that, or you can go all in and you say, we're going to figure out how to move our most complicated one and work through all of those issues. Well, and that's a huge amount of signaling. So if they're going to invest in that kind of project, they're getting off of Oracle eventually, because that's where they're signaling. And they're probably at that point signaling internally to flesh out all the problems, and also signaling to Oracle, too, [? when ?] the next license contract comes around. I think it's inevitable that we're going to see at least some movement off of Oracle. So all of the conversations that we're having, whether people are aggressively moving there or not, it's a topic that's being explored. And it is, I would call it, at least an early indicator that