Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering cloud computing and emerging tech industries
Database software - statistics & facts
Rapid growth in the technology industry has provided people from around the world with countless improvements in convenience, communication, and data access. Business and government spending on information technology products and services worldwide is expected to eclipse five trillion U.S. dollars in 2024, with one of the largest components of that growth being software-related. Enterprise software spending has more than tripled in the decade from 2014 to 2024, eventually amounting to over a trillion U.S. dollars.
What are Database management systems?
Database management systems (DBMSs) are software applications that allow companies to administrate large databases of information. The most popular among these DBMSs are Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. Relational DBMSs are the most popular type of DBMSs and are used by the majority of adopters; other DBMS types include document stores, key-value stores, search engines, etc. This becomes extremely crucial as the growth of artificial intelligence creates demand for massive amounts of data for training and inference.
Cloud migration
The migration to the cloud taking place in the overall software industry also impacts the DBMS market. Around half of open source DBMSs on OpenStack are already deployed in the cloud, and database as a service is one of the most widely adopted cloud services. Database-related products and services are also the most common solutions offered on the marketplaces of cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Using public cloud platforms to manage databases delivers benefits such as greater scalability, lower cost, and less maintenance.
Commercial and open source DBMSs
Many DBMSs are free, open-source technologies such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, but large companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM also play an important role in shaping the industry. Open-source DBMSs have been gaining popularity over the years; as of 2023, commercial DBMSs and open source DBMSs are almost equally popular among users.
Although, due to the negative economic impact brought by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, the software spending growth has recovered since 2022. The software market will nevertheless remain strong and is expected to register strong growth year-on-year, especially with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). With the advancements in GenAI that are currently shaping our world, the demand for database-related software will see a boosted growth.
