Systems of Intelligence Are Driving Database Proliferation: Part 2 – Pricing and Licensing

Databases are just one more category of infrastructure software going through a slow motion collapse in price levels with the rise of open source and cloud-based metered pricing. The major consumer Internet online service providers virtually created world class open source data management software as a byproduct of building out their core services. That changed the pricing and licensing dynamics for traditional vendors.

Every enterprise now has to think about performance tiers for their data. Business critical transactions are going to be in traditional SQL databases for a *long* time. But practitioners will have to weigh pricing, licensing, skill sets, and cultural fit in addition to feature sets.