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Oracle DB admins urged to swap their gas guzzler for an electric car

Businesses can bet on open source – or at least use it as a threat

The challenge

The challenge for companies, as various conference speakers framed it, involves managing the tension between business groups that introduce innovations through open source software and IT groups that have to take responsibility for that innovation.

Gartner analyst Merv Adrian, in a panel discussion, said many of his firm's customers say they're struggling to cope with change driven by developers outside of IT groups. When software projects rise to a certain level of usefulness, he said, they require adult supervision in the form of organizational support, integration with corporate systems, backup integration, policy enforcement, and the like.

And many of these software projects involve open source software, Adrian said, noting that there have been about twice as many Postgres inquiries this year compared to last year. He said that puts the software at about the same level as Cassandra and DB2, and close to SQL Server in terms of client interest.

In an interview with The Register, Marc Linster, senior VP of product management at EnterpriseDB, said, "IT managers are caught between the desire to be flexible, but also to keep stuff in-house, control the costs, know where the data is, and so on."

EnterpriseDB aims to provide the tooling necessary for responsible oversight of Postgres projects through EDB ARK, among other offerings. Left alone to choose an AWS configuration, said Linster, a developer could cost a company thousands of dollars a week through over-provisioned services. EDB Ark allows IT managers to determine the allocation of computing resources within an organization, and thus control costs.

Linster acknowledged that EnterpriseDB competes mostly with Oracle, and also with SQL Server to some extent. And he said it can be difficult to convince Oracle customers to change habits that have worked for decades.

The good news for companies considering investment in open source software is that doing so needn't preclude relationships with legacy vendors.

During the panel discussion, Joe Schuler, VP and senior business leader of data architecture at MasterCard, endorsed Postgres, not only as a valuable technology but also as a form of leverage when negotiating software licensing contracts.

Schuler said, "We can go to the Oracles of the world and say 'we're deploying everything on this product, but we like what you have here, so could you give it to us at a reduced cost?'"

Park your electric car on the street, so everyone can see it, and keep your Hummer in the garage, just in case. ®

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