The perfect storm of the cloud, mobility and big data has led to a blooming in the database market. After years and years of Oracle's dominance with Microsoft's SQL server carving out the Windows-only market and MySQL offering a long-awaited open source alternative, the database market is booming.
Many of these new database offerings cater to storage in the cloud, mobile devices and SaaS-based offerings. Open source is a consistent feature across the spectrum. Whether we are moving away from relational databases to NoSQL, consuming databases in a SaaS-based setting or making better use of existing SQL technologies, we are seeing more choices than we have in a long time.
I had a chance to sit down and chat with three executives from three leading cloud database vendors. Each company has a different approach to the market. The three are:
- James Phillips, co-founder of Couchbase, a leading NoSQL company,
- Razi Sharir, CEO of Xeround, a SaaS MySQL company
- Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB, the company behind commercial versions of PostgreSQL database
The four of us discussed how to choose the best database for your cloud applications. It may be that you need more than one. We also discussed the current state of the market and best practices in database design and management today, as well as what may be ahead in the DB market.
Have a listen to our discussion, which runs about 20 minutes: