We discuss the rising interest in cloud and on-premises open source relational databases and why we should consider them as viable replacements for their commercial counterparts. We analyze the causal factors driving their increasing popularity, learn how the cloud is accelerating that growth and evaluate the perennial favorites as well as some of the more recent open source offerings. We end with a discussion on recommended commercial DBMS product replacement strategies and open source vendor selection best practices.

1. INSIGHTS Presentation Series
The Rising Interest in
Open Source
Relational Databases
Chris Foot, VP Technologies and Strategies
Date: 6/22/2017Replacing traditional DBMS licensed products with
open source offerings
Video Presentation
Inside!

2. The Largest Pure Play Provider of Managed Data
Infrastructure Services
Database Platforms
SQL Server
Oracle
PostgreSQL*
DB2
MongoDB*
MySQL*
Operating Systems
Unix/LinuxWindows
Edge Technologies
SQL Server BI
Oracle EBS
SharePoint
Exchange
Environment
450+ Customers
10,000 Servers
200+ DBAs
Fortune 100s
Startups
All Verticals
Cloud Systems
Amazon AWS/RDS
Oracle Cloud DB
DBPaaS
Msoft Azure
IaaS (dozens)
Hybrid Cloud
* All distributions
We support
hundreds of
commercial and
open source DBs!
And understand
benefits and
weaknesses of
both platforms

3. Lots of Open Source Alternatives
Public Cloud DBaaS
CLOUD
NoSQL
MySQL
PostgreSQL
OPEN

4. Wide Range of Pricing and Support Services
• Pure Open Source
o Most commonly known as Community Editions
o No licensing fees
o Support provided by community
• Open Source With Professional Support Services
o No licensing fees
o Vendors provide 24x7x365 support for open source offerings
• Open Source Commercial Versions
o Vendors start with base code and add additional features
o Link to community editions and push enterprise offerings
o Customers purchasing commercial versions take advantage of additional
features and can choose from 24x7x365 support options
o Quickly adopt community edition new releases
o Commercial vendors may/may not contribute their advanced features back to
community (mostly not)
• Pay as You Go
o Database Platform as a Service or DBPaaS
o All vendors are jumping into the cloud
o Cloud providers rent their versions of open source offerings
X
Open Source
Doesn’t Mean
Everything is Free

5. Why Aren’t We Discussing NoSQL?
March’s RDX Insights Series presentation focused on NoSQL
YouTube presentation:
https://youtu.be/JbyEglIvLjo
Slideshare presentation:
https://www.slideshare.net/ChristopherFoot/nosql-architecture-overview

6. DB-Engines Popularity Trends
http://www.db-engines.com
Open Source Popularity
Increasing
Commercial Decreasing

7. DB-Engines Top 5
http://www.db-engines.com
Big drop in
popularity
score between
#2 and #3
MySQL score
exceeds
SQL Server
Big drop
beween #1
and #2

8. DB-Engines Growth
http://www.db-engines.com
Oracle and MySQL dropping in popularity
PostgreSQL and SQL Server increasing in popularity
PostgreSQL
overtakes
MongoDB

9. DB-Engines Popularity By Storage Model
http://www.db-engines.com
Relational 80%
NoSQL 20%

10. DB-Engines Storage Models (2013 -2017)
http://www.db-engines.com
Popularity leadership changed many times for NoSQL storage models
Relational stays
constant at
80%

11. NoSQL vendors desire to
increase market share will
drive them to compete directly
with relational product
manufacturers
Vendors will add RDBMS-like
functionality that allows their
product to be more widely
adopted. Those that don’t will
quickly lose market share to
those that do
The larger relational vendors
will attempt to co-opt any
NoSQL technology that
challenges their dominant
role in the industry
As they identify offerings as
tangible threats, their
strategy will be to ensure
that the technologies used
by those vendors become a
component of, not a
replacement for, their
traditional database
products
Relational
DBMS
NoSQL
DBMS
General Purpose
DBMS
The Multi-Model DBMS Engine

12. Dice Insights
JOB TITLES
IN
MORE DEMAND

13. • Runs on Windows and Linux
• ACID compliant, object-relational
• Robust procedural language – PL/pgSQL
• Supports all major programming languages
• Triggers, foreign keys, functions, triggers, views,
materialized views, JSON, key-value, recursive
• Statistics based optimizer, parallel query, secondary
indexes, index-only, range/list partitioning, full text search
• Log shipping, standby, master/slave, multi-master through
open source and commercial add-ons
• Clustering available through open source and commercial
offerings add-ons
• Roles, row-level security, security, labels, SSL, connection
limits, LDAP, Radius
• Point-in-time recovery
• Lots of open source GUI administration tools available
• Rapidly increasing in popularity
• Robust open source development community
• Many commercial support options available
• Number of cloud DBPaaS offerings growing quickly
o Amazon Aurora and Google SQL
• Growing popularity is:
o Increasing vendor competition
o Growing number of vendors offering tools,
integrating their apps with PostgreSQL, offering add-
on features and support services
PostgreSQL

14. • Robust set of services, administrative tools and add-on
features
• Provides Oracle, SQL Server conversion tools
• EDB Postgres Ark allows users to seamlessly deploy on
public/private clouds
• EDB Postgres Enterprise Manager is monitoring product
• EDB Replication Server provides multi-master
• EDB Failover Manager provides automatic failover
• EDB Postgres Advanced server provides native database
compatibility with Oracle (PL/SQL, built-in packages,
tools)
• EDB Public Cloud is a DBPaaS deployment for Amazon
AWS and Google Compute Platform
PostgreSQL Vendor Offerings
• Increasingly popular cloud development and runtime
platform
• Robust architecture simplifies and accelerates the
development and deployment of cloud based apps
• Robust, scalable, runtime environment with strong
monitoring capabilities
• Built on specialized Linux containers called Dynos which
offer easy scalability
• Dozens of utility add-ons (databases, logging, email,
analytics)
• Offers PostgreSQL as a Service (DBPaaS)

15. PostgreSQL Vendor Offerings
• PostgreSQL as a Service (DBPaaS)
• Deploy to Amazon AWS, Microsoft
Azure, Google Compute Engine, IBM
Softlayer
• Automated backups, provisioning,
replication configuration, monitoring
tools
• Support for multi-data center and
multi-region
• Plans based on data stored, memory,
CPU, concurrent connections
• Amazon RDS support for Oracle
MySQL, MariaDB
• Announced Aurora’s PostgreSQL
compatibility in April 2017
• States that “all of the code,
applications, drivers and tools you
use today with your PostgreSQL
databases can be used with Amazon
Aurora with no change.”
• Google’s Cloud SQL PostgreSQL
compatibility is currently in beta
• Scales to 32 processors and 200 GB
of RAM
• Still being improved and updated
as of the date of this presentation
• Original codebase was PostgreSQL
• HIGHLY modified for massively
parallel data warehouses
• Continues as open source

16. • Perennial open source favorite and powerhouse
• Runs on 20 platforms
• Oracle “sponsors” and offers commercial editions
(Classic, Embedded, Standard, Enterprise and Cluster)
• Community releases minor releases every 2 months
• ACID compliant
• Multiple storage engines tailor DB to workloads
• Wide range of GUI admin tools and utilities available
• Supports all major programming languages, JSON
• Triggers, foreign keys, stored procedures, functions,
views
• Statistics based optimizer, secondary indexes, index-only
(covering index), range/list/hash partitioning, full-text
search
• Log shipping, standby, master/slave and multi-
master
• Clustering available through open source and
commercial offerings
• Galera cluster is known to be an excellent open
source clustering solution with support services
available
• Roles, SSL, encryption, security plug-ins
• Point-in-time recovery
MySQL

17. • Oracle offers following commercial editions (Classic,
Embedded, Standard, Enterprise and Cluster)
• Standard Edition does not have advanced features
(compared to more expensive versions) but does
provide 24x7 support, maintenance releases
• Enterprise Edition offers cloud, Enterprise Dashboard,
Query Analyzer, Replication Monitor, partitioning,
MySQL Router, hot backups for InnoDB,
full/incremental/partial backups, full/partial/hot
selective restore, PIT recovery, Enterprise Encryption,
Enterprise Audit, Enterprise Firewall, Group Replication,
InnoDB Cluster, Oracle OEM Admin Tool for MySQL
• Robust MySQL DBPaaS cloud offering
• Cluster CGE Edition provides support for high
availability, heavy workloads and massive scaling
• Oracle touts 99.999% availability, 200 million
reads/second, 2.45 million SQL
statements/second
• Provides same features as Enterprise
• Also offers in-memory, SQL and NoSQL APIs,
multi-site clusters with active/active geo
replication, auto sharding with full join,
referential integrity and ACID support,
partitioning, NDB Storage Engine, MySQL Cluster
Manager
MySQL Vendor Offerings

18. • Offers Percona servers for MySQL and MongoDB
• Describes product as “a free, fully compatible,
enhanced, open source drop-in replacement for MySQL
that provides superior performance, scalability and
instrumentation. “
• Provides 24x7 support for MySQL, Percona and MariaDB
• Percona server includes utilities that add additional
administrative capabilities and very strong visibility into
MySQL performance
• Historic flagship product is open source XtraDB Cluster
• Percona XtraDB Backup is open source hot backup utility
• Percona TokuDB is a highly optimized storage engine for
Percona Server providing HA, compression and
performance features
• Sole focus is MySQL cloud, offering MySQL for
Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Softlayer,
Microsoft Azure
• Editions include Community, Developer, Standard
and Enterprise
• Leverages inherent cloud features (regions, geo data
distribution)
• Also provides automatic backup scheduling,
automatic failover, read replicas, multi-cloud and
cloud/on-premises clustering, master/slave and
master/master replication, backup encryption
• Advertises benefits of no cloud vendor lock-in
• 100% up-time guarantee that 1 master node will be
online
MySQL Vendor Offerings

19. MySQL Vendor Offerings
• Amazon RDS support for Oracle MySQL, MariaDB
• States that Aurora is “fully compatible with MySQL 5.6
using the InnoDB storage engine”
• Offers utilities that allow customers to convert competing
MySQL products to Aurora
• Also offers on-premises to cloud replication tool to
facilitate cloud conversions
• Provides “push button” scalability
• Leverages Amazon architecture for storage, backups, geo
data redundancy, read replicas, database snapshots,
• PIT recovery, encryption, monitoring tools, event alerts
• Need to be cognizant of feature mismatch between
Aurora and traditional MySQL offerings
• Provides traditional cloud benefits including automatic
backups, failover
• Leverages Google architecture for geo data replication
• Scalability to 10TB of storage capacity, 25,000 IOPS,
and 208GB of RAM per instance
• Provides replication, encryption for DB and backups
• Focuses on enterprise class cloud architectures
• Provides MySQL as a DBPaaS fully managed service
offering
• Database replication and enterprise monitoring tool is
an extra charge

20. • Created by the original developers of MySQL
• Goal was to continue MySQL as a pure open source
community project (reaction to Oracle takeover of
MySQL)
• Goal is for MariaDB to be a seamless drop in for MySQL
• The product is a fork of MySQL 5.5. There will be
variations between MySQL and MariaDB. Goal of the
community is to keep these to a minimum
• Vibrant development community that is rapidly
providing additional features to the core product
• Offers more storage engines than commercial
counterpart
• MySQL vs MariaDB feature comparisons can be found
here:
• Increasing number of vendors offering 24x7 support
• Increasing number of vendors providing MariaDB
DBPaaS
• Amazon offers MariaDB RDS service
• MariaDB 10.1 download includes Galera row-level
master/slave and master/master clustering add on
MariaDB
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/mariadb-vs-mysql-features/

21. Who Will Win the
Database Wars?
Open Source
DBMS
Commercial
DBMS

22. Strengths Weaknesses
• Lower up-front licensing costs
• Lower maintenance costs
• Growing feature set and increasing
functionality
• Vendors stepping in to provide 24/7 product
support and maintenance
• Vendor support quality can range the spectrum
• Access to DBA and developer skill sets
• Challenge to compete with huge, big budget
vendors constantly offering new features –
especially for high availability, scalability, data
warehouses
• Third-party software provider adoption
(applications, tools and utilities)
• Conversion costs
• Interaction with other DB systems
Open Source DBMS

23. Strengths Weaknesses
• Strong vendor support
• Robust features and functionality
• Most vendors have strong cloud strategies
• Strong third-party software provider
adoption (applications, tools and utilities)
• Access to DBA and developer skill sets
• Higher up-front licensing costs
• Higher maintenance costs
• Vendors' licensing practices often become
predatory
• Complex to administer
Commercial DBMS

24. RDX Recommends
 Add an open source database to your stable of products
 Create an open source/commercial database strategy
 Thoroughly understand and evaluate competing offerings
 Consider cloud based and on-premises alternatives
 Select the appropriate database(s) for initial conversions
 Production applications require 24x7 product support

25. RDX Recommends
 These DBS will support mission critical apps (they have for
years), but go with a proven software support provider
(Oracle, Amazon, EDB, Percona, CenturyLink, ClearDB)
 They are cost effective, robust, reliable alternatives to
commercial products
 Realize that adding a new product will incur startup and
conversion costs
 Oracle customers should consider EDB as a way to reduce
overall DB TCO without extensive training and retooling

26. Policies and Procedures
Monitoring and Event Management
Impact on Existing Tools and Technologies
Training and Education
New Staffing Roles and Responsibilities
Change Management
Administration
New DBs Will Change the
Way Your Organization
Provides Support
Costing Models

27. DBMS Product Features
Don’t Always Match
100% App Code
Transportability
Database
Features
Cloud DBMS vs On-Premises
Distributions and Forks
Vendor Feature Add Ons

28. The More You Have to Tailor Your DB/Application to
a Distribution
The harder it will
become to switch
vendors

29. Upcoming Presentations – Cloud’s Hidden Impact on IT Support
Organizations, Benefits of PCI DSS Compliance
The RDX Report
Microsoft BI Overview and Power BI Demo, SQL Server 2017 New Features, Amazon AWS
Data Migration Services and Google Cloud SQL Support for PostgreSQL
LinkedIn
Selecting Cloud DBMS, NoSQL Architectures, Database Security Series, Improving Customer
Service
20YEARS OF
SERVICE DELIVERY
EXPERIENCE
cfoot@rdx.com
Video recording of this presentation can be found
on RDX’s YouTube Channel:
RDX YouTube Channel Presentation