EnterpriseDB's Survey Results: Interesting, But I Have to Wonder....

Today at the OSCON conference in Oregon, open source database company EnterpriseDB announced the results of its 2008 Open Source Database Survey. It collected the opinions of 500 corporate IT leaders on enterprise adoption of open source databases. There is an executive summary of the findings available as a free PDF download.  EnterpriseDB focuses as a company on PostgreSQL, so it is calling out many of the findings from the survey related to that product, but there are other points of interest. In a few cases, I had to question the results. For example, only nine percent of respondents said they prefer commercial databases to open source ones.

In a recent story we did on a Forrester survey of IT decision makers, there were pronounced opinions about the security of open source software, and other concerns. I have to strongly wonder about more than nine in 10 IT leaders saying they prefer open source databases. That makes me think the sample here may be skewed.

The EnterpriseDB survey includes some information about what IT departments are migrating away from. A majority of them reported that they are migrating from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle's databases to open source solutions.For people who are migrating to open source, those would be logical applications for them to be migrating from.

Among the most important criteria survey respondents reported seeing as important for an open source database were performance and scalability. Ease of use was next on the list, and reliability followed that.

In other findings, twenty-nine percent of respondents cited Web 2.0-style applications as the most popular style used in conjunction with open source databases. Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said that their databases were zero to fifty gigabytes in size. Isn't that a little small for databases overseen by "corporate IT leaders?"

Among platforms for deploying open source databases, the survey shows Linux as the most popular at sixty-seven percent of responses. Windows was next at 27 percent, Mac OS X was ranked third, and Solaris, AIX and HP-UX were at the very bottom. PHP and Java were ranked as the most popular languages for building database-centric applications. While there are a few points of interest in the findings, quite a few of them just don't line up with what I've seen elsewhere.