Sun’s Allan Packer (author of Configuring and Tuning Databases on the Solaris Platform) has published a lengthy and fascinating blog post on the future of proprietary databases in which he discusses the likelihood of MySQL, PostgreSQL et al challenging Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Packer’s multi-part post covers a number of areas including:

Feature Stagnation In The Traditional Database Market
License Costs: the Soft Underbelly of Proprietary Databases
The Looming Open Source Database Tsunami

While Packer does not believe that proprietary databases are doomed, he does see the writing on the wall in emerging markets and that the increased use of open source will eventually surround proprietary databases in established markets. Unless the proprietary suppliers respond they risk losing business in the long-term.

This is due, according to Packer, to the increase functionality and performance of open source alternatives, but also due to proprietary vendors taking advantage of decreased processor and server costs to hike up the price of their offerings.

As evidence, Packer compares the cost of deploying an Oracle database on a Sun Fire V480 server versus its V490 replacement. The V490 included Sun’s dual-core UltraSPARC-IV chip, rather than the V480’s single-core UltraSPARC-III chip. It therefore effectively provided users with double the performance at the same price.

“Not so for the Oracle database price, though. Based on per-core licensing, the new system was now treated as an 8-core system instead of a 4-core system as previously. And worse, users were forced to a significantly more expensive database edition if they deployed systems with more than four cores,” Packer explains.

The result is that the database was effectively 5.3 times as expensive on the V490 as on the V480. “So while users continued to enjoy more powerful and more feature-rich hardware at the same or lower price, they were paying a lot more to use the same database software on the new hardware.”

There is a lot more to database choice than just cost, of course, but Packer suggests that if the proprietary vendors do not react soon their actions may well come back to haunt them:

“It seems difficult to resist the conclusion that proprietary database companies have managed to redirect a good chunk of these savings away from end users and into their own coffers. Successful as this strategy has been, though, it could ultimately backfire. The more expensive proprietary databases become, the more attractive lower cost alternatives appear,” Packer writes.

“I suspect that proprietary companies, if they are to do it at all, will need to reduce prices soon; if enough momentum builds around OSDBs we will reach a tipping point where it won’t matter any more.”

Packer’s blog post is especially interesting to me as I am working on my own research here at The 451 Group in to the impact of open source on the database market. Look out for more on the subject in 2008.

Via Simon Phipps.