The Gartner DBMS Magic Quadrant

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a report published by Gartner, a US-based research and advisory firm, the aim being to provide an unbiased analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. These analyses are focused on the technology industry and are updated every 1-2 years in order to reflect the current landscape. The Magic Quadrant is aimed at CIOs, CTOs, infrastructure managers, database and application architects, database administrators and IT purchasing managers across organisations of all sizes. On 12th October 2015 Gartner published an updated Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (DBMS). The DBMS world - which has been stagnant for years with the big players having the lion's share of the market - is now enjoying a dynamic resurgence, in part due to the innovations being made in Cloud computing that is seeing these established leaders being seriously challenged for the first time by new entrants into the market. For the purposes of this Magic Quadrant, Gartner has defined a DBMS as, “a complete system used to define, create, manage, update and query a database”. Relational (RDBMS) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases are included and there is no stipulation that the DBMS must be a closed-source product. Additionally, all vendor’s products are treated as a set, in the case of Oracle they are included once in the Magic Quadrant and the rating is based on their entire product set - Oracle Database, Oracle TimesTen, Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle NoSQL Database and MySQL. What is most interesting about the October 2015 Magic Quadrant is the inclusion of Amazon Web Services (AWS) straight into the Leaders quadrant. The fact that AWS was not included in the 2013 DBMS Magic Quadrant makes this all the more impressive. Gartner rates vendors upon two criteria: completeness of vision and ability to execute. Leaders are said to score highly on both criteria. From this, we can confidently state that for running DBMS solutions, AWS is now recognised as a key player alongside such well-established industry giants as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. Drilling deeper into the report, Gartner has assessed AWS on their Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB offerings. RDS is currently available for Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL databases. It should be noted that running a traditional, non-RDS database installation on an EC2 instance is not part of the assessment. The key AWS strengths identified are:

• Diverse product capabilities: AWS provides a wide range of product capabilities, spanning relational and NoSQL technologies. It continues to release new products to meet or exceed the market's demands.
• Geographic availability: Based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS supports 30 availability zones spanning 19 countries and five continents. While all services are not available in all zones, AWS's cloud infrastructure is one of the largest, most diverse and stable.
• Ease of doing business: AWS scored high in the survey of reference customers for ease of doing business. Three-quarters of them plan to purchase additional services from AWS within the next 12 months.

Here at Nordcloud we are passionate about all things Cloud and the associated benefits that customers can gain from a well designed, highly available, secure, scalable infrastructure that can be provisioned and deployed quickly and easily. Our team of Cloud Architects includes database technologists who have worked extensively for years across all major DBMS platforms in a diverse range of industries such as finance, media, telecoms and education. We understand that data is the most critical part of any business and that any loss or breach can cause severe reputational damage and financial impact. We have the knowledge, skills and experience to migrate your data securely and successfully to the Cloud, and our work delivering this for customers over a range of successful projects is a testament to this. We are also able to assist you in migrating your data from older database platforms, many which have severely prohibitive licensing arrangements, to newer pay as you go RDS technologies such as AWS Aurora. If you are interested in migrating your data to the Cloud, or simply understanding more about how your DBMS can run in AWS then please let us know, we would love to hear from you.