No offense taken, Savio. It was a good report and on one hand does suggest that open-source databases aren't having a negative impact on the proprietary database vendors.

But (glass is half-full comment on its way :-) how do you explain MySQL doing as well as it has? Forget the $1B valuation. It was doing very well in its own right. Now, granted, it's just one vendor and even if it were doing $500M (as Red Hat is, roughly), that's still a drop in the proverbial bucket, given that none of the other open-source database vendors have yet matured to the point that they're doing MySQL levels of revenue.

No, I think we're seeing two things:

1. Open source is still very, very new. We can be doing fantastically well and still not cause a ripple in the proprietary water. But at some point something's got to give. I sell this stuff every day and advise 10 other companies that do the same. All the signs are positive. Every company is experiencing significant growth every quarter. At some point that starts to crimp proprietary revenue, or it stops and the proprietary world wins. But you know which side I'm rooting for....

2. Open source is truly creating new markets. Google couldn't be Google with Oracle or DB2. It simply couldn't. The economics and the licenses wouldn't give it the flexibility and innovation (from Google, not necessarily from MySQL) to grow when and how it wishes. Google needs MySQL. MySQL owns this web world.

Granted, it's a world that doesn't like to spend a lot of money today. But when the old-line retailers/etc. go online, they'll do it with MySQL and they'll be much more willing to pay. That's how markets work. The early adopters pay little but push you into the mainstream, and the mainstream pays.

I think your skepticism is healthy. It's very possible that I sometimes share it. In fact, almost certain. But I've seen enough to suggest that near-term skepticism will invariably get mowed over by long-term opportunity. I've been actively involved in open source for a decade, and I've watched my own skepticism and disbelief routinely fall flat when the market said "More."

It will happen to you, too, Savio. :-)

Thanks Savio. While the statement you quoted is undoubtedly glass-half-full, we do also have some positive things to say about open source databases! Ultimately we were trying to take a realistic, independent, view of open source database adoption, and our survey of database purchasers (not developers or admins, but the people who write the cheques) suggested that the current situation is not going to change any time soon. Now admittedly, not all open source database deployments have a cheque associated with them, but as we're talking about enterprise applications, they should. We do see a bright future for the adoption of open source databases for enterprise applications but progress is, and is likely to remain, slow.