There were some impressive pull-out figures, which revealed the underlying concerns of the market and some of the drivers for open source adoption:

The remaining respondents are spread across the world, giving us a truly global perspective and showing the diversity, reach, and enthusiasm of the open source community.

Database Demographics

Number of Database Instances In Production

Our data showed that over half of businesses used 25 instances or less. Unsurprisingly, the larger the company, the more often respondents had up to 10000 instances (or even more) in production.

Database Footprint

Another of our new questions for 2020 looked at how database footprints were growing. As we suspected, 82% of respondents reported at least a 5% growth over the last year, and 62% reported a more significant increase, with 12% growing over 50%!

Multi-Database Deployments

Overall, companies that ran a combination of MongoDB and PostgreSQL showed the most significant overall jump, with a rise from 24% in 2019, to 30% in 2020.

Medium-sized companies increased their adoption of multi-database deployments the most in 2020, with an 8% increase in the combinations of MySQL and MongoDB, and MongoDB and PostgreSQL, and a 7% increase in the mix of MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL. This growth in multi-database adoption by medium-sized companies could be a result of companies wanting to stay agile and avoid vendor lock-in by using open source alternatives.

The most significant growth segment for larger companies, up by 4% in 2020, was the combination of MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Conversely, the combination of MySQL and PostgreSQL dropped by 6% for larger companies this year. The combination of MySQL and PostgreSQL had the least growth of the four combinations, remaining static, or falling, for small and medium companies. One explanation might be that companies are choosing a completely NoSQL alternative, rather than running multiple flavors of SQL databases.

In 2019 smaller companies were more likely to use Google than Microsoft, though this gap closed entirely in 2020. Medium and large companies indicated that they were far more likely to choose Microsoft over Google this year, with a big jump from 31% of large companies using Microsoft in 2019 to 44% in 2020. Our results showed a significant decline in popularity for Google, who lost market share to Microsoft across the board.

Multi-Cloud Use

This data shows that moving to the cloud is still a significant focus for all company sizes, as cloud companies make it as easy as possible to migrate. Many businesses are attracted by the possibility of ‘fully-managed services,’ lower hosting and license fees, and reduced data center and hardware costs.

Our results showed a bump in companies now ‘running some DBaaS,’ up from 40% in 2019 to 45% in 2020. Unsurprisingly, this also meant companies that are running ‘No DBaaS’ fell from 60% in 2019 to 56% in 2020.

The number of companies using more ‘2 or more providers’ also increased (in line with the trend of companies looking to mitigate their risk), going from just 10% in 2019 to 14% in 2020.

The most significant change here is large companies, 28% of which now use two providers or more, compared to just 17% in 2019, far higher than small and medium companies (at 12% and 10% respectively). This might be because larger companies have more data to parcel off and more money to spend on multiple providers.

Adoption of Kubernetes increased slightly in 2020, with 47% of respondents using it internally for development and testing of applications (up from 44%) and 36% using it for production (up from 32%).

The percentage of respondents who used Kubernetes to run databases also increased this year, with 36% using it for development and testing (up from 33%) and 23% using it for production (up from 17%).

26% of our survey respondents use cloud-based tool options, up from 22% last year. Continued growth here is likely, as the race to host and run databases in cloud-based environments increases.

Given the negative impact that performance issues and downtime has on businesses, this reiterates how crucial it is to ensure that your databases are correctly configured and optimized.

When comparing 2019 results to this year, we saw some interesting trends. This survey was conducted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns over cost savings and avoiding vendor lock-in were both flagged, each one a compelling reason to consider open source.

Cost concerns grew, which is a little strange given that open source software doesn’t charge license fees. This might be confusion around the ‘open source’ versus ‘open core’ model, which has caught some companies out in the past.