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2019 Open Source Database Trends & Predictions

Forrest Lymburner

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As we wrap up 2018 and prepare for 2019 we decided it was time to take a moment and pause to think about the changes that have been happening over the past year and what we see coming in the future of open source databases.

2019 Database Industry Predictions

DBTA

DevOps will focus more on integration at the edge between services: The traditional, on-premises database infrastructure model is clearly changing. Over the last few years, we have seen accelerating migration toward infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which includes the database environment in database as a service (DBaaS). The increased dominance of cloud services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—along with developing technologies, such as Kubernetes and the serverless model—are evidence that the trend will continue.”

Data Will Drive the Enterprise in 2019: The year just ending has been an interesting one for data managers. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning took center stage, which also meant an increasingly glaring spotlight on data sourcing, management, and viability. The continued rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) also meant no letting up on demands for data environments to deliver requirements fast and furiously. The year ahead will bring more of the same—as well as a continuation of the transformation of information management.”

VMBLOG

The Year of NoSQL and Hadoop Enterprise Data Management: If 2018 was the year the market crossed the tipping point of mainstream acceptance of Hadoop and NoSQL for business-critical applications, then 2019 will almost certainly be the year in which global enterprises deploy enterprise data management for Hadoop and NoSQL to protect and manage these massive (and growing) workloads.”

McAfee

Data Exfiltration Attacks to Target the Cloud: In the past two years, enterprises have widely adopted the Software-as-a-Service model, such as Office 365, as well as Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service cloud models, such as AWS and Azure. With this move, far more corporate data now resides in the cloud. In 2019, we expect a significant increase in attacks that follow the data to the cloud.”

Pythian

Kubernetes Is King: With the growth of DevOps comes a growth in the size and complexity of container production clusters. An orchestration tool is needed to deploy and manage container clusters, and Kubernetes has emerged as the orchestration tool of choice. As a demonstration of Kubernetes’ dominance, Docker is now distributing and supporting the tool while still investing in its own orchestration system, Swarm. If a new tool comes along to challenge Kubernetes, we predict it won’t be anytime soon.”

2019 Severalnines Team Predictions

Johan Andersson, Chief Technology Officer & co-founder

  • Databases are becoming more and more specialised. Polyglot environments will become the norm and developers will in an even larger degree make use of data storages suitable for a particular (micro) service. Data stores will in turn more and more be consumed as a service and served from the cloud. Thus, the complexity of high availability and scaling is abstracted from the user and moved to the vendor. So these trends will just continue to evolve. Security is ever growing concern.
  • The adoption of Persistent memory will increase and increasing in-memory storage capacity and will make a difference in real time data storage tier and its applications to meet the demand of ever growing data and fast access to it.

Alex Yu, VP of Products

  • We are going to continue to see increased adoption with hybrid and multi-cloud strategies (public and private cloud) with vendor lock-in mitigated by moving more services, applications and database stacks to become fully cloud-native.
  • I also hope to see more NoSQL DBaaS alternatives offering CockroachDB or FoundationDB as the database platform of choice.
  • Intelligence (“AI”) in database management; monitoring workload patterns and apply automatic configuration tuning for performance optimizations, predicting storage outages or node and cluster failures.

Ashraf Sharif, Sr Support Engineer

  • We’re 8 months out from MySQL 8.0’s GA and it should be about time to see some real production migrations and adoptions. With Percona Xtrabackup for MySQL 8.0 is now available, plus upcoming incorporation with Galera Cluster, 2019 shall be the year where MySQL 8.0 mass adoption takes place.
  • ProxySQL 2.0 will soon become GA, may become the de facto reverse-proxy in highly available setups with many long awaited features like GTID consistent reads, frontend SSL and Galera native support.
  • Kubernetes has grown full maturity as the leader in orchestrating containerized stateful applications like sessions and databases. Many contributors have started to write Custom Controllers to overcome limitations by the built-in replication controller. It’s pretty exciting to see the rapid growth in this field to achieve full database automation life-cycle and ultimately solve many challenges when running database containers in scale.

Krzysztof Ksiazek, Sr Support Engineer

  • I would expect to see a 2019 as a year of abstracting the backend even further. Serverless is a new trend which makes it even easier to work with databases. You don’t have to worry about scaling your backend, you don’t have to worry about high availability. All of that burden is put on the side of the service provider while developers can focus on designing the application and writing the code.
  • Containers are also on the rise with Kubernetes looking to become a standard in Docker container orchestration. This will definitely have large impact on how the database environment will be designed in 2019

Paul Namuag, Support Engineer

  • DevOps tools will continue to evolve, but this time will not focus only about monitoring and alerting; but will leverage more on scalability, performance, security and fraud analysis, log analysis, and probably include some financial cost analysis that would be able to generate reports and run a certain advisory. The continuing adaptation of serverless and “containerized” platforms will be a role player in this event as this helps lower the billing and cost in contrast to the current on-premise platforms that are still utilized or implemented.
  • PostgreSQL will have more attention specially the upcoming release of PostgreSQL 12. NoSQL databases as well could gain attention such that MongoDB license change to SSPL can still impact but provide opportunity to the other NoSQL family databases.
  • Kubernetes is gaining much traction so as serverless platform, thus there could be more game changing tools might arise the next year especially now that parallelism and scaling is very important in the technology.

Sebastian Insausti, Support Engineer

  • During the past year, we have seen an increase of the PostgreSQL’s users. This will continue to grow more and more thanks to the new improvements of the latest versions, where some of the weakest points of the engine have been attacked, such as replication and stored procedures. These improvements open the door to new possible functionalities such as native multimaster replication or some other failover or HA improvement. All this helps PostgreSQL to be one of the most complete open source databases that exist and that, thanks to the community, is improving more and more.

Jean-Jérôme Schmidt, VP of Marketing

  • While 2018 saw the introduction of the GDPR in Europe, which brought with it a frenzy of activity in terms of how EU citizens data is treated and managed across the globe, its impact on individuals, businesses and organisations world-wide is yet to be seen. 2019 could well be the year to reveal how profound the GDPR’s impact is on how data and databases are managed world-wide, and whether other states or economic areas might follow suit. I predict that data protection will continue to be much discussed topic, and that database technology will need continue to adapt accordingly in 2019.

Simona Lazea, Director of Sales

  • With an increase in cyber attacks and data breaches happening in 2018 across a lot of verticals and major companies, from Facebook, to Uber, Google+, British Airways and even the health insurance giant Aetna, 2019 will bring more security concerns in the data management space. Data encryption, secured backups, database audits are only a few areas of focus for small and large companies alike in the next year.
  • More and more traditional businesses are looking to compete with their digital-born opponents. Market incumbents are rapidly and heavily adopting open-source databases in an effort to ensure agility and high availability at a fraction of their current costs. While there is no one technology fitting all use cases, PostgreSQL seems to be the no. 1 contender for legacy proprietary database replacements in 2019.

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