The Big Picture:
Open Source Dominance, AI-Led Workload Shifts, and the Increasingly Diverse Database Environment
The Long & Short
The average enterprise is using more databases and adjacent tooling for more applications than ever before. As these increasingly diverse, AI-driven database estates continue to expand, organizations are looking to streamline and unify—reducing the risk of fragmentation and its associated costs in cloud bills, mean time to repair (MTTR), staffing, and overall velocity. Offering unmatched flexibility, visibility and control, open source solutions are winning the day. But in order to make the most of these tools, decision-makers must actively manage licensing risk, platformize operations, and prepare for an increasingly uncertain, AI-first future.
Data now underpins virtually every aspect of business operations and decision-making. Organizations are using more data to do more things than ever before. As a result, they are adopting more and more solutions in order to store, manage, and derive the greatest amount of value from their data footprints. But as single database environments fade, the problem of fragmentation and siloed, disconnected solutions is coming to the fore.
Runaway cloud costs, ballooning TCO, and reduced velocity rear their heads quickly in untamed, sprawling DB environments. As a result, we are quickly seeing database infrastructure and management becoming a strategic differentiator for businesses, with significant implications for customer experience, revenue generation, AI capabilities, and overall competitive agility.
To stay ahead of the competition, organizations must find clarity in the chaos of this rapidly changing ecosystem.
Open Source Software Takes Center Stage in the Enterprise Database Space
The days of uncertainty and doubt around open source software (OSS) are long behind us. In their most recent Global Spotlights Insights Report, the Linux Foundation found that a staggering 79% of professionals believe that the open source development approach leads to better software development, 68% believe that open source software is in fact more secure than proprietary, and 64% experienced increased business value from OSS use in the past year.
Open source has made its way into the mainstream enterprise environment, and database management solutions are no exception. Open source database management systems (DBMSs) have become ubiquitous in the modern enterprise. From PostgreSQL and MySQL to ClickHouse, OS DBMSs are dominating technical roadmaps. The reason is simple: OSS provides flexibility, community-driven innovation, and freedom from vendor lock-in—advantages that legacy proprietary systems can’t match in the era of composable architecture.
According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the two most popular databases among professional developers were PostgreSQL and MySQL, with 56% and 41% of respondents saying they’d done “extensive development” work on them over the previous year and plan to do so in the year ahead. And when large-scale customers like Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb build and scale on open technologies, they set a precedent that others follow.
Yet, OSS alone isn’t a panacea. In practice, teams are left juggling dozens of tools—each optimized for a niche function (ingestion, transformation, serving, analytics). Database fragmentation is a byproduct of innovation at speed—but the cost is technical debt, brittle integrations, and operational complexity.
While open source databases offer many advantages, customers ultimately care most about getting high-performance, secure software that provides incredible value for their needs. When you spend less on your tools, you can spend more on the talent and support you need to get the most value possible out of them. That’s one of the greatest benefits of open source.
Bennie Grant
Chief Operations Officer
Percona
As enterprises integrate AI into core workflows, the architecture of workloads is fundamentally shifting. Where we once had discrete systems for data ingestion, processing, and storage, AI is forcing a rethinking of this topology. Training pipelines, vector databases, fine-tuning infrastructure, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) stacks have all come into play in order to accommodate the seismic shift brought about by the rise of AI.
Traditional infrastructure isn’t optimized for this level of dynamic computation. Latency SLAs are tighter, data freshness becomes critical, and the expectation of “always-on intelligence” reshapes how systems are built and deployed.
Altogether, these forces are driving significant changes to enterprise data infrastructure. For instance, a report from Databricks found that vector database usage grew 377% in the last year alone. And this is just one example of the dramatic changes being brought about by the rise of AI. Moving forward, we can expect to see many more such developments as the role and nature of AI continues to develop and evolve.
In a Diverse, Ever-Changing Space, Openness & Flexibility are Key
Given this fundamental state of flux, qualities like flexibility, portability, and control have become invaluable to business decision makers.
At the same time, rising costs and an uncertain economic outlook have put increased budgetary pressures on organizations across industries.
In a recent report, Gartner® found that integration issues, limitations around customization, and the risk of vendor lock-in were the top three challenges arising from buying and using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software1. These were accompanied by other concerns, such as hidden costs and lack of vendor support, as well.
In today’s technological and economic context, the restraints associated with proprietary software are often more costly to organizations than the price tags themselves. In order to remain agile, business decision-makers should prioritize permissiveness, interoperability, portability, and interoperability. Together, these qualities provide a resiliency that simply can’t be had from closed solutions. Moving forward, organizations should architect their database environments around the pillars of:
Permissiveness - Community-led projects with truly open, OSI-approved software licenses.
Scalability - Cloud-native solutions that allow teams to spin up solutions quickly and provide resilience and reduce costs.
Integration/Extensibility – Open source solutions that offer customization and whose communities continue to innovate, bringing new capabilities into the ecosystem as technology and business needs change.
1 Gartner, Optimize Costs and Innovation by Shifting to Open-Source Solutions, Jim Scheibmeir, Nitish Tyagi, Dave Micko, Tigran Egiazarov, July 2025
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner,Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally
Insights from the Field: The Case for an Open Source-First Database Environment
For the inaugural edition of our State of Open Source Database Management report, we sat down with a number of industry experts and practitioners to gather real-world insights directly from the field. From those conversations, clear themes began to emerge around the increased diversification of database environments, and the challenges this presents.
One theme we saw emerge time and time again was the idea that, all other things being equal, open source software was preferable than proprietary in the world of database management. And while cost savings were undoubtedly a motivating factor, there were many other compelling reasons at play as well.
Chief among those were the ideas of flexibility, portability, support, and the lack of vendor lock-in. For Jeff Nolan, Director, Web Operations at Choice Home Warranty, these inherent qualities of OSS have proven invaluable to his company’s operations. With a relatively small team, using open source software means they can mitigate costs, avoid lock-in, and have access to a wider pool of support and services providers that work with their infrastructure. And when it comes to migrating, open source database options offer a degree of portability that simply isn’t true of proprietary software.
Open source databases offer a degree of freedom and flexibility you won’t find in proprietary systems. And that made our move from MariaDB to MySQL almost effortless. Our schemas, data, and apps worked without reformatting or translation. The two have diverged in some advanced features, but because they share open source roots, and a common core, it helped keep the migration work straightforward.
Jeff Nolan
Director, Web Operations
Choice Home Warranty
Diego Martin Infiesta, IT Infrastructure Manager at Ryanair, explains that the same qualities are also critical at scale. For his team, open source databases like PostgreSQL and open source containerization solutions like Kubernetes have become foundational to their operations. After being dissatisfied with proprietary solutions, Infiesta and his team were able to find what they needed in open source.
“Working with heavily-audited, mission critical systems, performance, security, and resiliency are all vital for us,” Infiesta explained. “We had been using a proprietary database solution, but found it to be insecure, difficult to maintain, and simply not worth the high licensing costs. So, we did a small proof-of-concept running PostgreSQL and it went extremely well. We then worked with Percona to assist with a total migration to PostgreSQL and we couldn’t be happier with it.”
All things being equal, open source database solutions will always be preferable to their closed source counterparts. From cost, to continuous updates and innovation, community-led open source databases provide outsized value that can’t be matched by proprietary tools. Open source is just as, if not more, capable of meeting the security and performance standards of highly sensitive data and high-stakes environments.
Diego Martin Infiesta
IT Infrastructure Manager
Ryanair