Why Oracle’s Database supremacy could be over

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

Since it’s original release back in 1979 the Oracle Database has been the industry standard to beat. However in 2022, most developers under the age of 40 haven’t even heard of it and it which will have wide-ranging impacts in the decades to come for Oracle. The rise of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud along with open source databases like Postgres, and MongoDB have seen Oracle’s market share decline gradually over a period of many years. Gartner research noted that Oracle’s Database Market share has collapsed from 36.1% in 2017 to just 20.6% in 2021:

www.gartner.com

While Microsoft, and its ubiquitous SQL database has remained relatively stable, and grown to be the largest vendor by market share since 2020, Oracle’s market share has collapsed in the same period largely thanks to public cloud providers Amazon, and Google.

Oracle’s biggest concern must be the fact that the majority of developers buildings the next generation of business applications are not choosing the Oracle database; they are choosing modern cloud scalable open source databases that are native to the hyperscaler of their preference such as Amazon Aurora or Amazon MemoryDB for Redis. Gone are the days where the Oracle database was the de-facto solution across everything from Banking to Ecommerce, and everything in between. The majority of SaaS applications now use free and open-source databases, and success stories such as Netflix and Xero have disproven Oracle’s claim that they do not scale for millions, and 10s of millions of concurrent users.

Can Oracle recover it’s database market share? Only time will tell, but it is looking unlikely given the trend-line evidenced in the Gartner Research. Oracle’s priorities indicate that even they see the writing on the wall, focusing on moving up the value chain with their ERP applications like Fusion Cloud ERP, NetSuite, Micros, and Cerner. Much of Oracle’s recent investment has involved leveraging the capability of their decades of database IP and know-how to build out real world analytics, and application functionality to rival SAP and Workday’s enterprise applications.

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