The trend of increasing adoption of open source databases like MySQL, Postgres and flavors of NoSQL isn’t going away any time soon.Resistance to the OSDBMS in the enterprise is diminishing as CIOs and IT managers realize that it is indeed a low-cost yet reliable alternative to the proprietary RDBMS, especially with the advent of better management functions and support.
DBTA recently held a webcast featuring Jeffrey Surretsky sales engineer, information management group, Quest Software, who discussed the rapid growth of commercial-grade open source database platforms and highlight some of the challenges their use presents to developers and administrators unfamiliar with them.
Gartner predicts that…“by 2022, more than 70 percent of new in-house applications will be developed on an open-source database management system (OSDBMS)……and 50 percent of existing commercial relationaldatabase management system (RDBMS) instances will have been converted or will be in process of converting,” Surretsky explained.
Migrating to open source can be tricky as the open source database will not be 100% the same as the businesses favorite proprietary database.
Migrating schema can be the easiest part of a migration but can be much more difficult to get app-specific packages, functions, and stored procedures to run without change, according to Surretsky.
He recommends the following tips for migrating projects:
- Pick the right project
- Be upfront about what workloads fit best for migration
- Go for those that need minimum amount of architecting and maximum chance of success
- Migrate don’t rewrite
- Rewriting an application is a risky, time-consuming and costly and often open up new problems and issues
- Don’t “throw out the baby” – leverage everything you can – infrastructure, process and people
- Navigate existing contracts
- Your commercial vendors have ‘engineered’ their contracts to get the most lock-in they can from you
- Migrate as much as you can while those contracts are in place – to get leverage for the next contract negotiation
Choosing the right toolset will give companies benefits such as competitive edge, product stability, tailored product support and training, high usability, and reduces business risk with a partner.
Quest offers Toad Edge which provides users with:
- Support for MySQL and Postgres
- Object and user management
- Advanced JSON data browser/editor
- Schema compare and sync
- SQL Query monitor
- Jenkins coninous integration plug-in
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.