Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 1 of 15
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database
Management Systems
16 October 2014 ID:G00261660
Analyst(s): Donald Feinberg, Merv Adrian, Nick Heudecker
VIEW SUMMARY
The operational DBMS market continues to grow, with innovative products and features being delivered
by both new and traditional vendors. Information management leaders will be particularly interested by
the changes in the Leaders quadrant.
Market Definition/Description
The operational database management system (DBMS; see Note 1) market is defined by relational and
nonrelational database management products that are suitable for a broad range of enterprise-level
transactional applications. These include purchased business applications such as enterprise resource
planning (ERP), customer relationship management and customized transactional systems built by an
organization's development team. In addition, we include DBMS products that also support interaction
data and observation data (see Note 2) as new transaction types. These products are also used both for
purchased business applications, such as ERP, catalog management and security event management,
and for customized systems.
Additionally, operational DBMSs should provide interfaces to independent programs and tools that
permit, and govern the performance of, a variety of concurrent workload types. There is no
presupposition that these DBMSs must support the relational model or the full set of data types in use
today. Further, there is no requirement that the DBMS be a closed-source product; commercially
supported open-source DBMS products are included in this market.
Operational DBMSs must include functionality to support backup and recovery, and have some form of
transaction durability — although the atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) model is
not a requirement. For open-source DBMSs, maintenance and support must be available from a vendor
that owns, or has substantial control over, the source code, and must be offered with a full General
Public License (GPL) or an alternative.
For this Magic Quadrant, we define operational DBMSs as systems that support multiple structures and
data types, such as XML, text, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), audio, image and video content.
They must include mechanisms to isolate workload resources and control various parameters of enduser access within managed instances of data (see Note 3). Emerging technologies, such as cloud-only
DBMSs, are not included; nor are highly specialized engines such as graph-only or object databases,
which may perform some transactions for small subsets of operational use cases. Products that "add a
layer" to and require or embed a complete or near-complete implementation of another commercially
marketed product, such as Oracle MySQL, are not included. Finally, "streaming" engines, whose use
cases are dominated by immediate event processing, and which are rarely, if ever, used for subsequent
management of the data involved, are also excluded.
For the purposes of this analysis, we treat all of a vendor's products as a set. If a vendor markets more
than one DBMS product that can be used as an operational DBMS, we describe them in the section
specific to that vendor, but we evaluate all of that vendor's products together as a single entity.
Strengths and Cautions relating to a specific offering or offerings are noted in the individual vendor
sections. It may be important for organizations to evaluate separate offerings as the range of choices
broadens, and as purchasers more frequently pursue best-of-breed strategies.
Operational DBMSs may support multiple delivery models, such as stand-alone DBMS software, certified
configurations, cloud (public and private) images or versions, and database appliances (see Note 4).
These are discussed and evaluated together in the analysis of each vendor.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTIONS
By 2017, the "NoSQL" label will cease to distinguish
DBMSs, which will reduce its value and result in it
falling out of use.
By 2017, all leading operational DBMSs will offer
multiple data models, relational and NoSQL, in a single
platform.
EVIDENCE
1
Oracle's Letter to the EU Concerning MySQL
After an antitrust investigation, the European
Commission approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun
Microsystems, including MySQL, on 21 January 2010.
Wikileaks subsequently published cables indicating that
the Obama administration applied pressure
to the EU to approve the deal.
Concerns about the MySQL acquisition had been
addressed in Oracle's 14 December 2009 pledges to
customers, which were to extend for five years — thus
expiring in early 2015. Oracle's pledges included
commitments to maintain certain APIs, extensions of
licenses to then-current licensees, continued use of
GPL licensing, and others. The expiration of these
commitments may change the nature of Oracle's
relationships with a number of hardware and software
vendors, as well as its posture regarding product
investment, support for purchasing requirements, and
other aspects of MySQL's business model.
2
Conference Survey Data
A survey is run annually at Gartner's IT Financial
Procurement and Asset Management summits, held in
Orlando, Florida, U.S. and London, U.K. The same
survey was also conducted at Gartner's Annual
Symposium 2013, in Orlando and Barcelona, Spain.
Respondents were asked to "Please rate the vendor(s)
with whom your organization has had negotiations
within the past 12 months. Please rate vendors based
upon the ease of doing business with them." The rating
scale was from 1 (not at all easy) to 7 (extremely
easy).
3
Reference Customer Survey
In addition to hundreds of interactions with users of
Gartner's client inquiry service, as part of the Magic
Quadrant process we sought the views of vendors'
reference customers via an online survey. The survey
included requests for feedback about vendor maturity
(for example, understanding of industries, provision of
innovation, responsiveness to new requests, TCO and
pricing) and product capabilities (for example,
flexibility in data modeling, support for data quality, UI
support for data stewardship, internal workflow and
support for multiple architectural styles). Over 400
organizations, representing all the featured vendors'
reference bases, responded to the survey, which was
held in July and August 2014. The reference customers
were generally pleased with their vendors and
products, but gave relatively low marks in some areas,
which we have detailed in the analysis of each vendor.
Some of the issues may be historical, because not all
organizations are on the latest product versions.
NOTE 1
DEFINITION OF A DATABASE
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (DBMS)
Gartner defines a DBMS as a complete software
system used to define, create, manage, update and
query a database, by which we mean an organized
collection of data that may be structured in multiple
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 2 of 15
formats and stored in some form of storage medium
(which can include hard-disk drives, flash memory,
solid-state drives and even DRAM). Additionally,
DBMSs should provide interfaces to, and govern the
performance of, independent programs and tools that
enable a variety of concurrent workload types.
NOTE 2
DEFINITIONS OF INTERACTION DATA AND
OBSERVATION DATA
These two new classes of data derive from social and
mobile interactions and observations:
Interaction data is the fabric of information in
the social sphere, generated from one or more
people interacting with devices and one another.
Interactions are associated with social phenomena:
new sources, such as tweets, Facebook posts and
weblogs, that record customers' activity and
behavior. They are also associated with more
traditional, but formerly little-used, types of data,
such as email archives, content repositories, and
voice and video recordings.
Observation data is generated by connected
devices, which enable and document much of the
impact of mobile technology and other new use
cases. Examples are geolocation data in Internet
Protocol data records, data from the Internet of
Things, and extensions of the call data records that
were so important to early mobile phone providers'
efforts to model customer behavior. This data
enables a new class of applications that provides
and restores context for simple transactions.
NOTE 3
OPERATIONAL DBMS WORKLOADS
Source: Gartner (October 2014)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Actian
Headquartered in Redwood City, California, U.S., Actian offers relational DBMS (RDBMS; Ingres) and
embedded (PSQL) engines, both suitable for operational use. Following a recent repositioning, Actian
focuses primarily on analytical use cases.
Actian did not respond to Gartner's requests for supplementary information or to review early drafts of
this section. Our analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including publicly available
information, previous briefings with Actian, and interactions with users of Gartner's client inquiry
service.
Strengths
Large customer base: Actian claimed to have over 210,000 customers at mid-2013. Broad
geographic and industry coverage for Ingres, and a loyal following for PSQL, remain in place in
2014.
Rich portfolio: Actian's offerings provide modern features, including multiversion concurrency
control (MVCC), object and geospatial support, and column-level encryption.
Embeddable offering: Actian's PSQL gives it a means of entering the small-footprint, minimaladministration market that is so important to mobile and Internet of Things applications.
Cautions
Complex portfolio, focused elsewhere: Actian's recent positioning efforts are aimed at
analytics, not operational use cases.
Deployment challenges: Actian received the lowest scores from customers surveyed in 2013 for
ease of use, and very low scores for ease of implementation. Our interactions with users of
Gartner's client inquiry service in 2014 paint the same picture.
Market focus: Gartner's interactions with clients continue to indicate a lack of momentum from
Actian in relation to its operational DBMS and support of its Ingres DBMS.
Aerospike
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, U.S., and founded in 2009, Aerospike markets a hybrid inmemory/flash NoSQL DBMS — a real-time data platform — for the operational transaction market. It is
available both as an open-source community version and an Enterprise Edition.
Strengths
Operational DBMS functionality: Aerospike's offering makes hybrid use of DRAM and flash as
addressable memory and not as file system support. Synchronous copies and support for multiple
data centers add high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. Aerospike's hybrid
DBMS structure supports JSON and NoSQL key-value data.
For the purposes of this evaluation, workloads that we
expect to be managed by operational DBMSs include
batch/bulk loading, real-time or continuous data
loading, concurrent online and Web-based new and
update transactions, operational reporting, and
management of externally distributed processes such
as "look aside" queries. Operational DBMS products
must provide the ability to prioritize these multiple
workloads to ensure SLAs are met when they operate
concurrently.
NOTE 4
DEFINITION OF A DBMS APPLIANCE
Gartner defines a DBMS appliance as a preinstalled
DBMS sold on hardware specifically configured and
balanced for optimized performance with an included
storage subsystem. In addition, a single point of
contact for support of the appliance is available from
the vendor.
EVALUATION CRITERIA DEFINITIONS
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by
the vendor for the defined market. This includes
current product/service capabilities, quality, feature
sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or
through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in
the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of
the overall organization's financial health, the financial
and practical success of the business unit, and the
likelihood that the individual business unit will continue
investing in the product, will continue offering the
product and will advance the state of the art within the
organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in
all presales activities and the structure that supports
them. This includes deal management, pricing and
negotiation, presales support, and the overall
effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond,
change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive
success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customer needs evolve and market dynamics change.
This criterion also considers the vendor's history of
responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity
and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the
organization's message to influence the market,
promote the brand and business, increase awareness
of the products, and establish a positive identification
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Marketing and hardware ecosystem: Aerospike has strong partnerships with hardware
component vendors for DRAM and flash memory. Its marketing focuses on the market segment
that requires high transaction rates with near-100% availability.
Performance: Aerospike's reference customers supported its claims of high performance by
awarding it the highest scores for performance of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant. They also
gave it the highest score for ease of doing business.
Cautions
Lack of full functionality: Aerospike is strong in HA functionality but lacking in some basic SQL
and NoSQL functions, although it has added some SQL functionality.
Competitive positioning: With an increasing number of vendors supporting in-memory DBMSs,
Aerospike will need to differentiate itself more clearly. Many vendors have much larger marketing
programs — a disadvantage for Aerospike.
HA/DR and ease of programming: Aerospike's reference customers identified difficulties in
programming and the management of HA/DR as weaknesses of its product, probably due to the
complexities of DR.
Altibase
Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea and Palo Alto, California, U.S., Altibase offers Altibase HDB, an
SQL operational DBMS capable of using in-memory, traditional disk or hybrid storage. Altibase XDB is
an in-memory-only DBMS.
Strengths
Performance and support: Reference customers gave Altibase high marks for the overall
performance of its operational DBMS, and for its support, professional services and ease of use.
Broad use case applicability: In addition to applying its technology to unique billing scenarios in
the telecommunications sector and real-time flaw detection in manufacturing scenarios, customers
use Altibase HDB for analytics and storage of textual and rich-media content.
Product maturity: Over 85% of Altibase's reference customers reported no problems with its
product.
Cautions
Limited global penetration: Although successful in Asian markets, Altibase has yet to establish
much brand awareness or penetration elsewhere. The company has recently established several
partnerships with global organizations.
Shortage of large reference customers: Reference customers themselves stated that
Altibase's limited number of globally recognized reference customers made adoption more difficult.
Narrow product focus: Altibase does not support alternative consistency models or support
multimodel capabilities, such as documents and graphs.
Basho Technologies
Newly headquartered in Seattle, Washington, U.S., Basho Technologies offers Riak, a distributed,
masterless key-value store. It is available as a free, open-source, Apache-licensed download, as an
Enterprise Edition, and as Riak CS, a multitenant cloud object store. Basho offers an Amazon Simple
Storage Service (S3) API and a cloud service.
Strengths
Page 3 of 15
©
with the product/brand and organization in the minds
of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a
combination of publicity, promotional initiatives,
thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and
services/programs that enable clients to be successful
with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes
the ways customers receive technical support or
account support. This can also include ancillary tools,
customer support programs (and the quality thereof),
availability of user groups, service-level agreements
and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its
goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of
the organizational structure, including skills,
experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles
that enable the organization to operate effectively and
efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to
understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate
those into products and services. Vendors that show
the highest degree of vision listen to and understand
buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance
those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of
messages consistently communicated throughout the
organization and externalized through the website,
advertising, customer programs and positioning
statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that
uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect
sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates
that extend the scope and depth of market reach,
skills, expertise, technologies, services and the
customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach
to product development and delivery that emphasizes
differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature
sets as they map to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the
vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy
to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of individual market segments, including
vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and
synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for
investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive
purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct
resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific
needs of geographies outside the "home" or native
geography, either directly or through partners,
channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that
geography and market.
2014 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights
reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner,
Inc. or its affiliates. This publication may not be
reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner’s
Rich features: Riak offers secondary indexes, MapReduce, support for JSON, tunable
prior written permission. If you are authorized to access
consistency, multiple programming languages, Apache Solr support and pluggable storage
this publication, your use of it is subject to the Usage
engines.
Guidelines for Gartner Services posted on gartner.com.
Growing paid customer base: Basho's customers include one-third of the Fortune 500
The information contained in this publication has been
companies in North America and EMEA. It also has a strong community, which contributes to the obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner
disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness
product.
or adequacy of such information and shall have no
liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such
Cautions
information. This publication consists of the opinions of
Gartner’s research organization and should not be
Single architecture focus: Riak's key-value-only architecture limits its broader adoption and
construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed
therefore restricts Basho to the Niche Players quadrant in the operational DBMS market.
herein are subject to change without notice. Although
Growing competition: Major vendors will continue to add key-value functionality (such as
Gartner research may include a discussion of related
legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or
Microsoft Azure Tables and Oracle NoSQL, both already available), which will create additional
services and its research should not be construed or used
competition for key-value use cases.
as such. Gartner is a public company, and its
Recent changes to management team and reorganization of company: These suggest that shareholders may include firms and funds that have
prospective customers should conduct a careful assessment before making major commitments to financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research.
Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior
Basho, even though its funding is strong and likely to grow.
managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is
produced independently by its research organization
Cloudera
without input or influence from these firms, funds or
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, U.S., Cloudera offers Cloudera Enterprise, a commercial version their managers. For further information on the
independence and integrity of Gartner research, see
of Apache Hadoop for which Apache HBase provides the operational DBMS capabilities. Cloudera
“Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity.”
Resilience: Riak provides multi-data-center distribution and replication with automated
balancing; it does not fail upon server failure or network partition.
Enterprise is available on-premises, as an appliance and through various cloud providers.
Strengths
Support for emerging use cases: 80% of Cloudera's reference customers use Cloudera
Enterprise for storing and processing machine-generated data, such as clickstreams and sensor
data. Using this observational data in transactions is now possible with HBase.
About Gartner | Careers | Newsroom | Policies | Site
Index | IT Glossary | Contact Gartner
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 4 of 15
Scalability: Cloudera's reference customers repeatedly mentioned Cloudera Enterprise's ability to
scale to accommodate massive data volumes.
Stability and ecosystem: Cloudera has raised over $1.2 billion in venture funding and has
developed a large partner ecosystem that encompasses every relevant segment of the enterprise
software market.
Cautions
Challenging implementation and use: Reference customers scored Cloudera lowest of all the
vendors in this Magic Quadrant for ease of implementation. It also scored poorly for ease of
operation and programming, and support and documentation.
Lack of differentiation: Cloudera's operational DBMS, Apache HBase, is also offered by its
competitors.
Focus: The operational DBMS is only one component of Cloudera Enterprise. It may have to
compete for development and support resources with the rest of the product suite.
Clustrix
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S., Clustrix offers a low-administration, shared-nothing,
distributed RDBMS, ClustrixDB, with automatic sharding and replication. It is available as on-premises
software and in the cloud. Clustrix also provides a managed database as a service.
Strengths
Performance: Clustrix provides extreme scale-out clustering for performance and availability.
Parallel SQL query execution across a cluster supports hybrid transaction/analytical processing
(HTAP) use cases.
Simplicity: The Clustrix database is designed to be largely self-managed, to reduce operational
complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO). Integration is simplified by the implementation of
the MySQL wire protocol.
E-commerce focus: Clustrix recently announced a new focus on applying its scale-out DBMS to e
-commerce applications that face scaling challenges.
Cautions
Lack of multimodel capabilities: ClustrixDB offers no support for data types beyond traditional
relational ones. More than half its reference customers have deployed another operational DBMS
to support nonrelational use cases.
Value challenges: Clustrix received low scores from its reference customers for overall value for
money. However, all reference customers were using the Clustrix appliance, not a software-only
product.
Poor early performance: Half the Magic Quadrant survey respondents who did not select
ClustrixDB stated that this was because its product performed poorly during a proof of concept
(POC) exercise.
Couchbase
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, U.S., Couchbase offers an open-source, distributed
multimodel (document and key value) NoSQL DBMS, Couchbase Server. It is offered in Community,
Enterprise and Lite Editions for on-premises, mobile or cloud deployment.
Strengths
Rich feature set: Couchbase's March 2014 release, Couchbase Server 2.5.1, offers in-memory
object caching, automatic partitioning, limited ACID transaction support, "eventual
persistence" (optional nonblocking writes to a caching layer), cross-data-center replication, a
synchronized, lightweight, embedded JSON DBMS, and MapReduce support. Couchbase also has a
strong technology road map.
Large customer base and revenue growth: Gartner estimates that Couchbase has over 450
customers in several industries. It also claims to have achieved 400% revenue growth in the past
year as its deal sizes have increased.
Financial and partner strength: Couchbase added a $60 million "E" venture funding round in
June 2014, which is helping to fund growth in its international presence. Couchbase has
established relationships with several hardware partners and leading system integrators.
Cautions
Quality: The number of responses from Couchbase's reference customers that reported bugs or
unreliable software was significantly above the average for this Magic Quadrant.
Missing functionality: Of the surveyed Couchbase customers, 48% reported some absent or
weak functionality. Some of these functions are on the road map, but not implemented yet.
Competition: Growing pressure from megavendors and MongoDB, especially in documentoriented use cases, is likely as interest in these use cases grows.
DataStax
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, U.S., DataStax provides DataStax Enterprise, a commercial
version of the open-source Apache Cassandra database. The product is downloadable for on-premises
operation, as well as through multiple cloud providers.
Strengths
Customer satisfaction: Reference customers scored DataStax above average for most metrics,
and awarded very high scores for overall DBMS performance and their experience of doing
business with this vendor.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 5 of 15
Expanding functionality: DataStax has added in-memory transactions, search capabilities, and
support for analytics through Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop. Reference customers identified
administration and development tools as positives.
Vibrant community: DataStax has helped develop a robust open-source community around
Apache Cassandra through developer and enterprise conferences.
Cautions
Weak brand traction: Inquiries from Gartner clients mention DataStax only one-third as often as
the open-source project Apache Cassandra. The market has yet to consistently associate DataStax
with Apache Cassandra.
Challenging starts: 53% of the respondents who evaluated DataStax did not select it due to
poor performance during POC testing. This may indicate a poor fit between the characteristics of
DataStax Enterprise and the piloted use cases.
Quality between versions: Reference customers identified regression bugs when upgrading to
new versions. DataStax must continue to invest in improving its quality.
EnterpriseDB
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., EnterpriseDB supports and markets the PostgreSQL
open-source DBMS, which it packages as an open-source community edition and as Postgres Plus
Advanced Server, including the Oracle Compatibility Feature.
Strengths
Community leadership: EnterpriseDB is the primary contributor to the PostgreSQL community.
It is responsible for many of the new features of PostgreSQL by contributing to JSON, materialized
views and partitioning.
Functionality: Gartner clients report that the functionality of EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Oracle
Compatibility Feature is now more than sufficient to run both mission-critical and non-missioncritical applications. Recently, Infor, a major application platform independent software vendor
(ISV), added EnterpriseDB as a DBMS platform choice.
Stability and compatibility: Reference customers commend the compatibility with Oracle, the
stability of the DBMS and the product support.
Cautions
Open-source dilemma: EnterpriseDB must conform to community-led release cycles for its
community editions as they go through the open-source process. This can slow the process of
enhancing the base open-source product, but not the enterprise edition.
Market exposure: EnterpriseDB lacks breadth in its sales and marketing operations, which
restricts its ability to communicate its message to potential enterprise customers. According to our
survey, those that did not choose EnterpriseDB would have been more likely to choose it if they
had been more familiar with it.
Support and documentation: Reference customers reported a lack of local-language support
and weak documentation.
FairCom
FairCom, which was founded in 1979, is headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, U.S. and privately
owned. FairCom c-treeACE (Advanced Core Engine), one of the oldest NoSQL DBMSs, is a fully ACID,
key-value store with both NoSQL (Indexed Sequential Access Method [ISAM]) interfaces and SQL, and
supports transactions with an embedded or stand-alone engine.
Strengths
Strong technology: c-treeACE is a very strong ACID key-value NoSQL DBMS with SQL
capabilities and a long history of stability and innovation. Cross-platform support (Unix/Linux/OS
X), scalability and strong HA stand out among its capabilities.
Customer base: FairCom has a large customer base, encompassing both stand-alone and
embedded implementations. The OEM (embedded) base is itself large and produces sustainable
revenue that enables investment in research and development (approximately 25% of revenue).
Satisfied customers: FairCom received some of the highest overall scores in our survey, with
high marks for customer support, professional services, performance, ease of doing business, ease
of operations and HA. Furthermore, over 75% of its reference customers reported no problems
with it.
Cautions
Marketing presence: FairCom lacks presence in the general DBMS market as it has a relatively
small marketing budget. Growth largely comes from within its existing customer base.
Small, largely unknown vendor: FairCom needs greater brand awareness to compete
effectively with other operational DBMS vendors, especially the better known NoSQL vendors.
Pricing: Reference customers identified FairCom's pricing model as an issue. We believe this is
because other NoSQL vendors offer an open-source pricing model.
IBM
Headquartered in Armonk, New York, U.S., IBM offers DB2 for z/OS, Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows
and Informix. Depending on the DBMS, IBM offers multiple deployment models, from hardware
bundling and appliances to deployment in IBM's SmartCloud or third-party clouds.
Strengths
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 6 of 15
Performance and features: Survey participants rated IBM highly (among the top three vendors)
for HA/DR and overall performance. In-memory DB2 with Blu Acceleration reflects IBM's early
vision for in-memory DBMSs. NoSQL support includes a MongoDB-compatible JSON API for
document-style, cloud delivery via its Cloudant acquisition and via Bluemix, and Resource
Description Framework (RDF) for graph models.
Hardware integration: DB2 for z/OS dynamically routes analytics to the IBM DB2 Analytics
Accelerator (IDAA), creating an efficient HTAP architecture in a single environment and reducing
mainframe MIPS to cut operating charges. Other IBM products, such as IBM PureData System for
Transactions, use integrated hardware and software.
Global presence: IBM provides support, implementation and services in multiple vertical
markets. It has one of the IT industry's largest networks of software, hardware and service
partners.
Cautions
Sales execution: Like other megavendors, IBM is opaque in its reporting of revenue and
customer numbers, but Gartner's RDBMS market share figures indicate that IBM declined in 2013,
losing second place in the market to Microsoft.
Complexity and pricing: For the second year in a row, survey participants scored IBM low for
pricing model suitability. Value for money was considered average. IBM is, however, expanding its
aggressive pricing, bundling and simplification efforts.
Software quality: Surveyed IBM customers rated it worst of all the vendors in this Magic
Quadrant for "software with bugs or unreliable software," and below average for ease of
implementation and ease of operation.
InterSystems
Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., InterSystems was founded in 1978. It markets
Caché, which was originally an object-oriented DBMS but is now a hybrid NoSQL/SQL transaction
engine. Caché has a strong position in the healthcare sector.
Strengths
Strong functionality: Caché supports a wide variety of data types with object, NoSQL and SQL
models, and has strong replication capabilities for HA/DR (as evidenced by strong scores from its
reference customers). Database management is automated, so it requires fewer staff resources.
Focused execution: After establishing a solid product and a large ISV ecosystem that is
embraced by the healthcare industry, InterSystems is addressing other markets and achieving
early success. Strong execution in the healthcare sector is one reason why InterSystems has
moved into the Leaders quadrant this year.
Performance: InterSystems received some of the highest scores from reference customers for
the overall performance of Caché and for their experience of doing business with the company.
This confirms the impression Gartner gets from other interactions with its customers.
Cautions
Market perception: Although InterSystems has branched out from the healthcare sector, it is
still generally perceived as being a healthcare-only provider. It must pursue a stronger market
vision to move into the broader operational DBMS market.
Marketing: InterSystems is a midsize DBMS vendor with potential for continued growth,
especially as 60% of its reference customers plan to purchase more from it. Investment in sales
and marketing is necessary if InterSystems is to challenge the broader market leaders.
Pricing: InterSystems received relatively low scores from reference customers for the suitability
of its pricing model.
MapR
Headquartered in San Jose, California, MapR provides the MapR Distribution, including Apache Hadoop.
The M7 Enterprise Database Edition includes MapR-DB, an operational DBMS compatible with Apache
HBase. It is available on-premises and through various cloud providers.
Strengths
Reliability and performance: Reference customers gave MapR high scores for its HA/DR
capabilities and cluster stability. Several commended the performance of MapR's operational
DBMS.
Support for emerging use cases: 90% of MapR's reference customers use M7 to capture and
analyze machine-generated data, such as log files, clickstreams and connected device data.
Differentiation and focus: MapR differentiates itself from similar vendors through its
replacement of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with the MapR Data Platform, which
exposes Network File System access.
Cautions
Availability of skills: 60% of the survey respondents did not select MapR owing to concerns
about the availability of relevant skills within their organization. Additionally, MapR's scores for
ease of programming were well below average.
After-sale support: Reference customers gave MapR lower scores for its support and
documentation and for its professional services.
Complexity: Several reference customers remarked on the complexity inherent in deploying
MapR's product and the overall immaturity of its ecosystem.
MariaDB
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 7 of 15
MariaDB (formerly SkySQL) is headquartered in Espoo, Finland. It markets two products: MariaDB 10,
an open-source, in-memory-capable, multimodel RDBMS based on, and fully compatible with, Oracle
MySQL; and MariaDB Enterprise, a commercially supported bundle with enterprise-targeted add-on
components. Both products are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, Ubuntu, Debian
(which includes MariaDB in its distributions) and Microsoft Windows. The company is headed by the
creators of MySQL.
Strengths
Rich functionality: MariaDB offers multiple storage engines, tunable persistence, ACID support
with the InnoDB/XtraDB engine, graph storage with Open Query Graph (OQGraph), and support
for Apache Cassandra and JSON.
Value: In our survey of reference customers, MariaDB received one of the three highest scores for
value for money, as it did for suitability of pricing method. It also received one of the highest
scores for "no problems encountered."
Strong community and partner network: MariaDB is at the heart of a vibrant MySQL user
community and ecosystem. It partners with Linux distribution vendors, IBM, Fusion-io, and
organizations offering products for special-purpose storage engines, management, backup and
HA, as well as service providers.
Cautions
Increased competition: MariaDB is increasingly visible and will face more competition,
especially as Oracle's consent decree with the EU regarding MySQL expires in 20151 and Oracle
becomes more aggressive.
Scale: MariaDB's reference customers mostly quantified the size of their largest databases as
being a few hundred gigabytes at most. To compete at the high end against increasing
competition, MariaDB will require more terabyte-size reference customers.
Fragmented offerings: Several customers remarked on the number of separate pieces in
MariaDB's software stack; one noted there are "too many independent tools for managing
databases."
MarkLogic
Headquartered in San Carlos, California, U.S., MarkLogic offers a document store DBMS in commercial
Essential Enterprise, Global Enterprise and Mobile editions, and free, fully-featured developer versions.
Its software can be deployed in VMware and Amazon Web Services environments, and, in collaboration
with SGI, as the DataRaptor appliance. In 2014, MarkLogic enters the Leaders quadrant for the first
time.
Strengths
Features: MarkLogic's mature enterprise features are extended with tiered storage, HDFS
support, backup to Amazon S3, JSON, mobile replication, full text search, geospatial capabilities,
Sparql language support, Resource Description Framework (RDF) import support and a converter
for MongoDB. Its road map is rich and ambitious.
Solid customer base and partner network: We estimate that, following recent sizable wins in
the financial services sector, MarkLogic now has over 300 commercial customers. It also has a
sizable partner ecosystem, which should add momentum to its recent solid growth.
Customer relationship: Reference customers gave MarkLogic high marks for their experience of
doing business with it.
Cautions
Pricing challenges: Surveyed customers ranked MarkLogic low in terms of value for money and
suitability of pricing model. However, MarkLogic altered its pricing structure in 2013 and lowered
its prices, and Gartner expects to see this reflected in future surveys.
Difficult to use: Of the vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant, MarkLogic received the lowest
overall score from survey respondents for ease of programming. For continued growth, delivery of
planned product enhancements and programming language support is essential.
Geographic concentration on North America: Well over 80% of MarkLogic's customers are in
North America. Its overseas expansion efforts must succeed if it is to compete with global
providers.
McObject
Headquartered in Issaquah, Washington, U.S., McObject offers eXtremeDB version 5.0, a smallfootprint relational in-memory DBMS with extended array and vector support. Since 2001, millions of
copies of eXtremeDB have been deployed worldwide in embedded and real-time applications.
Strengths
Deployment and configuration choices: Typically embedded, eXtremeDB supports Microsoft
Windows, Linux, real-time OSs and the Java Native Interface. Clustered configurations are
available.
Functionality: eXtremeDB provides full ACID and tunable persistence, multiversion concurrency
control, 64-bit support and hybrid storage for scalability.
Partnerships: McObject has partnerships with EMC, Fusion-io, HP, IBM and others. Numerous
distributors market its product, and it has customers worldwide.
Cautions
Marketing: eXtremeDB's multiple engines and horizontal and vertical scalability remain littleknown in the market.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 8 of 15
Limited targets: eXtremeDB is still seen as being marketed primarily for embedded applications,
although this is changing.
Customer satisfaction: Surveyed customers gave McObject low scores for HA/DR, ease of
implementation and ease of operation. These are not all new issues. Given the wide distribution of
eXtremeDB version 5.0, they reflect a failure to address continuing challenges.
Microsoft
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, U.S., Microsoft markets its SQL Server DBMS for the
operational DBMS market, as well as Microsoft Azure SQL Database (a database platform as a service)
and Microsoft Azure Tables. Microsoft now has in-memory row-store technology for transactions in SQL
Server 2014.
Strengths
Market vision: Microsoft's market-leading vision consists of in-memory computing (SQL Server
2014 now has full transaction in-memory support), NoSQL (with a new document-store DBMS),
cloud offerings (both cloud-only and hybrid cloud), use of analytics in transactions (HTAP) and
support of mobility. Its vision for in-memory computing and putting the "cloud first" is ahead of its
competitors.
Strong execution: Microsoft SQL Server is an enterprisewide, mission-critical DBMS capable of
competing with products from the other large DBMS vendors. Gartner's 2013 market share data
shows Microsoft taking second place from IBM in terms of total DBMS revenue.
Performance and support: Reference customers were very positive, with the performance of
SQL Server, documentation, support, ease of installation and operation all rated highly. Only 7%
reported problems with the DBMS overall.
Cautions
Lack of an appliance: Microsoft still lacks an appliance for transactions (one comparable to its
SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse appliance), whereas its major competitors (IBM, Oracle and
SAP) all offer one.
Market image: Although SQL Server is an enterprise-class DBMS, Microsoft continues to struggle
to dispel a perception of weakness in this area. Inquiries from Gartner clients demonstrate a
continuing perception that SQL Server is not used for mission-critical enterprisewide applications
— a view that inhibits wider use of SQL Server as a primary, enterprise-class DBMS.
HA/DR and pricing issues: Reference customers again found the pricing model for SQL Server
unacceptable (they gave it the lowest overall rating of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant) and
blamed the price changes that came with SQL Server 2012. Microsoft also received one of the
lowest overall scores for ease of implementing HA/DR.
MongoDB
Headquartered in New York City, New York and Palo Alto, California, U.S., MongoDB offers an opensource, document-style DBMS, as well as MongoDB Enterprise, a commercial offering available in
various service tiers. MongoDB Enterprise is available through several cloud providers, as well as onpremises.
Strengths
Customer satisfaction: MongoDB received high scores for every measurement of customer
satisfaction in the reference customer survey.
Improving enterprise capabilities: Recently announced partnerships with analytics and data
integration vendors enable MongoDB to tell a well-rounded information management story.
Operational and management support: Continued investment in the MongoDB Management
Service simplifies the running of a large cluster in terms of monitoring, backup and recovery, and
provisioning.
Cautions
Increasingly competitive landscape: Over the past year, several vendors have introduced
features that compete with MongoDB's core value proposition. MongoDB will face more pressure to
differentiate its offerings against entrenched competitors.
Growing pains: Although many reference customers reported that MongoDB is easy to get
started with, several reported challenges architecting MongoDB for large-scale deployments.
Trendiness with developers: MongoDB's popularity among developers means it is often
selected before application requirements are understood. This can result in a poor fit of DBMS
capabilities to the application.
Neo Technology
Neo Technology is headquartered in San Mateo, California, U.S. Neo4j is a native graph-style NoSQL
DBMS capable of handling transactions with ACID support and clustering for scalability and HA. Neo
became an incorporated company in 2011, but began developing its product much earlier, in 2000.
Neo4j, which was first used in a production environment in 2003, is offered as both an open-source
version and an Enterprise Edition.
Strengths
Native graph DBMS: Neo4j is a native graph-style DBMS (as opposed to an existing DBMS to
which graph capabilities have been added). It is engineered for performance with transactional
ACID capabilities in a single instance and offers tunable consistency across clusters for scalability.
Growth: Since its founding, Neo has seen strong growth from both its open-source version and
Enterprise Edition.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 9 of 15
Performance and ease of use: Reference customers identified performance, ease of operation
and implementation, and ease of doing business as strengths of Neo.
Cautions
Graph model: The graph DBMS model is difficult to understand, which lengthens the learning
curve. This problem is exacerbated by growing hype from other vendors about the introduction of
a graph model on a nongraph DBMS model.
Small vendor: Although the Neo4j product is over 10 years old and has grown consistently, Neo
remains a small vendor that faces all the issues of risk and stability associated with small vendors.
Pricing model and HA/DR: Reference customers identified Neo's pricing model as an issue.
They also expressed dissatisfaction with the product's HA/DR capabilities.
NuoDB
Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., NuoDB provides an operational DBMS designed to
scale horizontally and elastically. In addition to being available in on-premises and developer editions,
NuoDB's product is available on Amazon Web Services.
Strengths
Delivery and support: NuoDB received top scores for its support and documentation,
professional services and ease of programming. We believe this is enabling it to win contracts to
replace other vendors in several locations.
Rapid deployment: On average, reference customers estimated it took less than five months to
deploy NuoDB's product in production environments.
Support for emerging use cases: 80% of NuoDB's reference customers use it for capturing and
analyzing machine-generated data, such as clickstreams, log files and connected device data.
Cautions
Inconsistent experience: Although NuoDB received several top scores for service delivery,
documentation and support, reference customers that weren't full of praise were highly critical. As
a new vendor, NuoDB is still perfecting its service and support.
Slow momentum: NuoDB has not established a footprint in the developer community, which
commonly provides informal support and initiates tool development. Gartner clients have yet to
show interest in NuoDB during calls to our inquiry service.
Nascent partner ecosystem: NuoDB's partner program is still developing and has yet to attract
the necessary numbers to supplement the company's sales and implementation efforts.
Oracle
Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, U.S., Oracle markets a complete set of DBMS products
for operational systems. These include Oracle Database, Oracle TimesTen, Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle
NoSQL Database and MySQL. In addition to software, several of Oracle's DBMSs are available in
engineered systems (appliances).
Strengths
Broad range of offerings: Oracle has the broadest product portfolio in the market, covering
different DBMSs for multiple purposes (RDBMS, NoSQL, streaming data and mobile). Also, it offers
delivery in the cloud, on appliances and as stand-alone software. According to Gartner's 2013
market share numbers, Oracle remains in first place for total DBMS revenue market share.
Functionality: Oracle offers extensive functionality, with many new features (such as the JSON
data type and Temporal, which replaces Total Recall) and options such as the Oracle Database InMemory and Oracle Multitenant options, the latter moving multitenancy to the DBMS layer and
reducing support and maintenance. Oracle is also pioneering DBMS functionality on silicon, with
new SPARC M7 and T7 chips scheduled for delivery in 2015.
Solid performance and availability: Reference customers again identified Oracle's DBMS
performance and availability as primary reasons for implementation.
Cautions
Public perception of vision: Oracle's marketing continues to downplay its responses to market
trends (such as in-memory functionality) until it announces products. Oracle customers who use
Gartner's client inquiry service continue to show confusion and disillusionment in this regard, as
they have to make assumptions about Oracle's road maps and vision.
"Push back" on appliances: Users of Gartner's client inquiry service show a reluctance to
purchase products (such as engineered systems) due to perceived "lock in" to Oracle's proprietary
systems — some functions, for example, are available only on Oracle hardware and appliances,
such as those in Exadata Storage Server software.
Low cost/value and bugs: Reference customers consider Oracle's products to be expensive and
therefore that they have the lowest value proposition. Oracle also received one of the highest
scores for bugs reported. Finally, in recent Gartner surveys,2 Oracle received the lowest score for
ease of doing business.
Pivotal
Pivotal, a spinoff from EMC, is headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. It released Pivotal
GemFire XD in April 2014, combining GemFire, its distributed in-memory data grid, and SQLFire, its
distributed, memory-optimized SQL database, with Pivotal HD, its Hadoop distribution incorporating
Hawq (based on the Greenplum massively parallel processing [MPP] column-store DBMS). It is available
with Pivotal CF for cloud-based deployment.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 10 of 15
Strengths
Rich functionality: By combining an in-memory transactional engine with Pivotal HD's Hawq
analytic SQL engine, Pivotal enables large HTAP-style combinations of real-time transaction and
event processing for closed-loop systems. It offers HA, active-active deployment and rolling
upgrade support.
Flexible usages: GemFire provides native object-oriented and REST interfaces; Hawq provides
SQL analytics. GemFire XD supports structured data, geospatial data, objects, JSON and key-value
pairs.
Strong global organization: Pivotal has the resources and installed base of EMC as key assets.
They include manufacturing, research, and presale and postsale support worldwide.
Cautions
Maturity: Integrating multiple products is a complex process, and GemFireXD has been on the
market for only a few months. Pivotal received the lowest survey scores for support and
documentation, and below-average scores for ease of implementation and ease of operation —
though this is not unusual for an early-stage product. Its analytic appliance does not yet have an
operational counterpart.
Pricing and pricing model: Pivotal received very low survey scores for value for money and
suitability of pricing method, though its new simplified and flexible pricing model should help to
improve matters. Pivotal is one of the world's biggest startups, and its revenue will need to grow
rapidly to justify EMC's investment.
Market awareness: The number of inquiries received by Gartner regarding Pivotal products fell
to nearly zero after Pivotal was spun off, and has only recently begun to recover. Pivotal's use of
the EMC and VMware sales organization is starting to be felt, which is a positive sign.
SAP
Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, SAP has several DBMS products that are used for transaction
systems: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), SAP SQL Anywhere and SAP Hana. Both SAP ASE and
SAP SQL Anywhere are available as software only, while SAP Hana is marketed as an appliance.
Strengths
Leading vision: SAP remains a leader with its vision for HTAP: It now supports most of the SAP
applications that run on Hana on a single in-memory database used for transactions and analytics.
SAP reports that over 1,000 customers have purchased part or all of SAP Suite on Hana in just
over one year of general availability, which underlines the market's interest in HTAP.
Strong DBMS offerings: SAP has seen strong growth in SAP Hana, SAP ASE (now certified for
SAP applications) is growing strongly, and SAP SQL Anywhere continues to lead the mobility
market in terms of functionality.
Performance: Reference customers again identified performance (scalability and reliability) as a
major strength for SAP, awarding it one of the highest scores. Additionally, SAP received the
highest score for ease of operation across its DBMS products.
Cautions
Marketing communications: Interactions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service confirm
confusion over SAP's messages about how its DBMS products integrate, where each product can
be used, what SAP Hana can and cannot do, and most importantly, whether SAP Hana will be
required in the future.
Lack of skills: As inquiries from Gartner clients make clear, skills to support SAP Hana remain
scarce in the market.
HA/DR problems: SAP's reference customers (and especially users of SAP Hana) reported the
lowest level of satisfaction with their vendor's HA/DR capabilities. For the second year, SAP also
received the lowest score for clients' experience of doing business with it; similarly, in recent
2
Gartner conference surveys, SAP received the second-lowest score for ease of doing business.
TmaxData
Headquartered in Bundang-gu, South Korea, TmaxData provides Tibero, an SQL RDBMS featuring
various clustering options, integrated encryption and compatibility with other vendors' DBMS products.
Strengths
Satisfied customers: Reference customers scored TmaxData above average on most satisfaction
measures, and substantially above average for ease of implementation.
Support for mixed workloads: Tibero Active Cluster (TAC) is aimed at transactional workloads
using shared disk clustering, while Tibero InfiniData operates in a shared-nothing environment
and integrates with Hadoop for analytics workloads.
Several pricing options: Tibero is available in three editions. Each offers different
core/processor pricing options and features.
Cautions
Limited geographic traction: Despite opening offices in several countries in 2013 and 2014,
TmaxData has yet to gain significant traction outside South Korea.
Uneven postsale support: Reference customers gave TmaxData low scores for support and
documentation, and for professional services.
Software quality: Although no problems were reported consistently, only half of TmaxData's
reference customers reported encountering no problems with its products.
VoltDB
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 11 of 15
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., VoltDB markets an in-memory row-store operational
RDBMS that is increasingly available via vertical-market partners. VoltDB version 4.3, released in May
2014, is an open-source DBMS available as software only.
Strengths
Technology and vision: Substantial SQL-92 functionality, in-memory DBMS architecture and
precompiled Java stored procedures drive VoltDB's high performance in support of HTAP use
cases. Tunable consistency and JSON support have been added to give developers more flexibility.
Customer satisfaction: VoltDB, the only open-source in-memory DBMS vendor, received aboveaverage scores from reference customers for suitability of pricing and professional services.
Performance and value: As expected for an in-memory DBMS vendor, VoltDB received high
scores from reference customers for overall performance of the product and value for the price
paid.
Cautions
Competitive challenges: VoltDB's small, U.S.-centric sales organization and modest ecosystem
are growing, but their small size still limits its ability to reach new customers.
Feature gaps: Although VoltDB customers are overwhelmingly on the newest release, its
reference customers identified "some absent or weak functionality."
Revenue model: VoltDB's revenue remains relatively modest according to Gartner's estimates.
Extra funding will be needed to achieve the needed growth. A recent $8 million of Series "B" round
venture capital funding should help.
Vendors Added and Dropped
We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change.
As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may
change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the
next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a
reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus
by that vendor.
Added
Cloudera: This Hadoop distribution vendor now supports operational transactions through the use
of Apache HBase.
FairCom: This vendor sells a NoSQL DBMS.
MapR: This Hadoop distribution vendor now supports operational transactions through the use of
Apache HBase.
MariaDB: This vendor offers a MySQL-compatible, open-source RDBMS.
Neo Technology: This vendor's graph DBMS engine supports transactions.
Pivotal: This vendor's platform has an in-memory DBMS to support transactions across multiple
sources of data.
TmaxData: This South Korean vendor, which also competes in North America, offers an RDBMS.
Dropped
Orient Technologies: This vendor failed to meet the inclusion criteria.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
To be included in this Magic Quadrant, vendors and products had to meet the following criteria.
Software availability: Vendors had to have DBMS software generally available for licensing or
supported download for at least a year, as of 1 July 2014. Products that have been commercially
available for over 10 years but have not grown in terms of revenue at or near the market rate for
several years are excluded.
Software releases: We use the most recent generally available release of the software to evaluate
current technical capabilities. We do not consider beta, "early access," "technology preview," "ramp up"
or other releases that are not generally available. As regards reference customers and their survey
responses, all versions currently used in production are considered. When older versions are in use, we
consider whether later releases may have addressed any reported issues, but also the rate at which
customers move to newer versions.
Feature availability: Product evaluations include technical capabilities, features and functions present
in the product or supported for download through midnight, U.S. Eastern Daylight Time on 1 July 2014.
Capabilities, product features and functions released after this date could be included at Gartner's
discretion and in a manner Gartner that deemed appropriate to ensure the quality of this publication.
We also considered how such later releases could affect the end-user experience.
Customers and revenue: Vendors had to generate a minimum of $20 million U.S. dollars in verifiable
annual software revenue or have at least 100 verifiable and distinct customer organizations with
operational DBMSs in production. In addition, each vendor had to identify a minimum of 10 reference
customers who would respond to Gartner's approved reference customer survey (for this year's Magic
Quadrant, the survey questionnaire was in English only). Revenue can be from licenses, support and/or
maintenance. Gartner may include additional vendors based on undisclosed references in cases of
known use for classified but unspecified use cases.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 12 of 15
Support: The vendor had to provide support for its operational DBMS product(s). We also considered
products that control or participate in the engineering of open-source DBMSs and their support. We
required that a DBMS meet Gartner's definition of a DBMS (see Note 1).
Services: Vendors participating in the operational DBMS market had to demonstrate their ability to
deliver the necessary services to support transaction systems via the establishment and delivery of
support processes, professional services and/or committed resources and budget.
Geographical availability: Vendors had to demonstrate support for operational DBMS customers in at
least two of the following major regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and
Africa, and Asia/Pacific.
Excluded products: Product categories excluded from this Magic Quadrant (see also Market
Definition/Description) are:
Embedded-only DBMS products
Data warehouse-only DBMS products
DBMS products available only as a cloud service
Prerelational DBMS products
Graph-only DBMS products
Data grid products
Complex-event processing or streaming-data engines
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
The Ability to Execute criteria are primarily concerned with vendors' capabilities and maturity. Criteria
under this heading also consider products' portability, ability to scale, and ability to run in different
operating environments (giving the customer a range of options). Ability to Execute criteria are crucial
to customers' satisfaction and success with a product, so reference customer interviews and survey
responses are weighted heavily throughout.
Product or service includes the technical attributes of the DBMS(s), as well as features and functions
built specifically to manage the DBMS when used as a platform for transactions, interactions and
observations. We include HA/DR, performance and scalability, support for multiple deployment options
(such as virtualization, cloud and hybrid cloud/on-premises), and support for multiple programming
languages and new hardware and memory models. These attributes are evaluated across a variety of
database sizes and application workloads. We also consider the automated management, tools and
resources necessary to manage a database environment, especially as it scales to more complex
application workloads. Finally, we consider the flexibility of the DBMS to incorporate new data types,
application types and new requirements for distributing data across multiple servers and geographies.
Overall viability includes corporate aspects such as the skills of personnel, financial stability,
investment in research and development, and mergers and acquisitions. It also covers the
management's ability to respond to market changes and the company's ability to weather market
difficulties (crucial for long-term survival). Vendors are further evaluated on their ability to establish
dominance in meeting specific market demands.
Sales execution/pricing covers the price/performance and pricing models of the DBMS products, and
the ability of the sales force to manage accounts (based on feedback from interviews, surveys and
interactions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service). We also consider the market share of the
DBMS products. Also considered are the diversity and innovativeness of packaging and pricing models,
including the ability to promote, sell and support the products globally.
Market responsiveness/track record includes the diversity of the vendor's offerings in response to
changing market demands — for example, its ability and flexibility to offer appliances, cloud
deployment, new data types and new programming requirements. We consider general market
perceptions of the vendor and its products. We assess both the vendor's ability to adapt to market
changes during the previous 18 months and its flexibility in response to market dynamics over a longer
period.
Marketing execution evaluates such activities as lead generation, including traditional methods and
Internet-enabled trial software delivery, and the execution of channel development through partnering
agreements (including coseller, comarketing and colead management arrangements). Also considered
are the vendor's coordination and delivery of education and marketing events throughout the world and
across vertical markets, and the creation and support of "community" activities that help to raise
awareness and develop skills among buyers and prospective customers.
Customer experience evaluations are based primarily on reference customer surveys and interviews
conducted for this report, as well as discussions with users of Gartner's inquiry service during the
previous six quarters. We consider the vendor's track record of POCs, customers' perceptions of its
product(s), and customers' loyalty to the vendor (this reflects their tolerance of its practices and can
indicate their level of satisfaction). Additionally, customer input regarding the applicability of products
to limited use cases can be significant, depending on the success or failure of the vendor's approach in
the market.
Operations covers the alignment of the vendor's organization, as well as whether and how this
enhances its ability to deliver. Aspects considered include field delivery of appliances, manufacturing
(including the identification of diverse geographic cost advantages), internationalization of the product
(in light of both technical and legal requirements) and adequate staffing.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 13 of 15
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Product or Service
High
Overall Viability
Low
Sales Execution/Pricing
Medium
Market Responsiveness/Track Record
High
Marketing Execution
Medium
Customer Experience
High
Operations
Low
Source: Gartner (October 2014)
Completeness of Vision
Completeness of Vision encompasses a vendor's abilities to understand the functional capabilities
needed to support operational environments, to develop a product strategy that meets the market's
requirements, to comprehend overall market trends, and to influence or lead the market when
necessary. A visionary leadership role is necessary for the long-term viability of both product and
company. A vendor's vision may be demonstrated — and improved — by its willingness to extend its
influence throughout the market by working with independent third-party application software vendors
that deliver both additional functionality for the operational environment and commercial off-the-shelf
software. A successful vendor will be able not only to understand the competitive landscape of
operational transactions but also to shape the future of this field.
Market understanding assesses a vendor's ability to understand the market and shape its growth and
vision. In addition to examining a vendor's core competencies in this market, we considered its
awareness of new trends, such as the increasing sophistication of end users, growing scalability needs
(especially across server clusters), the cloud as a platform for DBMSs, the demand for in-memory
computing and HTAP, use of new consistency models, and the growing desire to use data structures
other than relational ones.
Marketing strategy refers to a vendor's marketing themes, research-and-development focus, and
ability to choose appropriate target markets and third-party software vendor partnerships to enhance
the marketability of its products. For example, we considered whether the vendor encourages and
supports ISVs in its efforts to support the DBMS in native mode (via, for instance, comarketing or
coadvertising with "value added" partners). This criterion includes the vendor's responses to the market
trends identified above and any offers of alternative solutions in its marketing materials and plans.
Sales strategy assesses how a vendor designs and targets its channels and partnerships developed to
assist with selling. This is especially important for younger organizations, as a good sales strategy can
enable them to greatly increase their market presence, while maintaining lower sales costs (for
example, through free downloadable community editions, coselling and joint advertising). This criterion
also covers a vendor's strategy for communicating its vision to its field organization and, therefore, to
clients and prospective customers. Also included are pricing innovations and strategies, such as new
licensing arrangements and cloud-based models for elastic provisioning to support peak demand.
Offering (product) strategy covers the design of product packaging and deployment options,
including the availability of cloud versions, developer editions and appliances based on the vendor's
DBMS. Vendors should demonstrate a diverse strategy that enables customers to choose what they
need to build a complete solution for an operational environment. Also covered are partners' offerings
that include technical, marketing, sales and support integration.
Business model covers how a vendor's model of a target market combines with its products and
pricing, and whether the vendor can generate profits with this model, judging from its packaging and
offerings. Additionally, we consider reviews of publicly announced earnings and forward-looking
statements relating to an intended market focus. For private companies and to supplement publicly
available information, we use proxies for earnings and new customer growth, such as the number of
Gartner clients indicating interest in, or awareness of, a vendor's products during calls to our inquiry
service.
Vertical/industry strategy affects a vendor's ability to understand its clients. Aspects such as vertical
-market sales teams and partnerships with vertical-market service providers are considered.
Innovation assesses vendors' approach to developing new functionality that aligns with its market and
offering strategies by allocating and managing research-and-development spending and leading the
market in new directions. Uses of new storage and hardware models are key examples of this.
Geographic strategy, including a vendor's worldwide reach, is assessed by considering its plan to use
its own resources in different regions, as well as those of subsidiaries and partners. This criterion
considers a vendor's plan for supporting clients throughout the world, around the clock, and in many
languages. Anticipation of regional and global economic conditions is also considered.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision
Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Market Understanding
High
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Evaluation Criteria
Weighting
Marketing Strategy
Medium
Sales Strategy
Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy
High
Business Model
Low
Vertical/Industry Strategy
Medium
Innovation
High
Geographic Strategy
Low
Page 14 of 15
Source: Gartner (October 2014)
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders
Leaders generally demonstrate the most support for a broad range of operational applications, based on
support for a wide range of data types and large numbers of concurrent users. These vendors
demonstrate consistent customer satisfaction and strong customer support. Many have competed in
this market for many years, and have built a wide partner ecosystem for their products. Hence, Leaders
generally represent the lowest risk for customers in the areas of performance, scalability, reliability and
support. As the market's demands change, so Leaders demonstrate strong vision in support not only of
the market's current needs but also of emerging trends. Finally, the messaging, product research and
development, and delivery of leaders are in line with today's market and with new trends in both DBMS
software and hardware technology.
Challengers
Challengers are stable vendors with strong, established offerings but a relative lack of vision. It is
normal for some vendors to have high scores for execution but to lag in terms of the adoption levels
and vision needed for leadership. Challengers normally show strong corporate viability and financial
stability, and demonstrate strong customer support. However, they lack the vision to support some of
the new trends in the operational DBMS market, such as support for interaction and observation data in
transactions, or a road map for moving toward in-memory DBMS capabilities. Although they may be
lacking in relation to some of the market's innovative concepts, Challengers offer stability, simplicity of
installation and support, and strong performance. As with the Niche Players, Gartner considers support
of a limited number of data types and hardware models as evidence of limited vision.
Visionaries
Visionaries take a forward-thinking approach to managing the hardware, software and end-user aspects
of an operational DBMS environment. Visionaries typically have innovative ideas for new functionality
and advanced use of new hardware. They have the requisite number of production customers, but lack
the market momentum of Leaders. In this market, Niche Players are often young, small and innovative
vendors with great new ideas that are spurring on the more mature vendors and the market in general.
Niche Players
Niche Players generally deliver a highly specialized product with limited market appeal. Frequently, a
Niche Player provides an exceptional operational DBMS product, but is isolated or limited to a specific
end-user community, region or industry. Although the solution itself may not have limitations, adoption
is limited. Niche Players contains vendors from several categories:
Those with an operational DBMS product that lacks a strong or a large customer base
Those with an operational DBMS that lacks the breadth of functionality of those of Leaders
Those with new operational DBMS products that lack general customer acceptance or the proven
functionality to move beyond niche status
Niche Players typically offer smaller, specialized solutions that are used for specific operational and
transactional applications, depending on the client's needs.
Context
At one time, Gartner viewed the online transaction processing (OLTP) DBMS market as very mature,
with few new entrants to challenge the status quo. However, in recent years, the market has changed
rapidly, which prompted our redefinition of it in 2013 as the operational DBMS market (see "The OLTP
DBMS Market Becomes the Operational DBMS Market"). With the introduction of NoSQL and Hadoop in
support of unstructured data in transactions and the viable use of in-memory computing, many
organizations are beginning to use these new DBMS engines for specific use cases, such as global
scalability of Web applications.
As there are now many new entrants, including small and less mature vendors, the market appears to
be split in two, although compared with the situation in 2013, the space between its two groups has
reduced. In one group are the innovative new vendors. In the other are the traditional, strong, mature
leaders. The reason for most of the vendors being below the midline in the Magic Quadrant is that they
support only one or two of the DBMS models (which include key value, graph, relational, table-style and
document-style), and only one or two of the multiple data types (such as structured [relational],
unstructured, XML, interaction and observation). The Leaders support a wide range of models and data
types in a scalable, highly available environment, which is one reason for the considerable space
between several of them and the newer vendors.
Another major focus for vendors in this market is support for in-memory computing. Most vendors are
beginning to add this functionality to their DBMSs, some with an in-memory-only model. Due to its
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015
Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems
Page 15 of 15
inherent speed, in-memory computing is becoming necessary for the processing of interaction and
observation data integrated into transactions. Most of the traditional vendors have introduced an inmemory DBMS, generally in support of analytics. This will eventually become the preferred model for all
DBMSs. The one form of memory not well adapted to data is flash when used as addressable memory
and not as a form of fast disk replacement. NAND flash is slower than DRAM, but it is more efficient
when used as addressable memory than as a disk block cache.
As the new vendors mature and offer a wider range of functions, the operational DBMS market will
become more homogeneous and commoditized (see "IT Market Clock for Database Management
Systems, 2014").
This Magic Quadrant deals with the key information management capabilities for transaction processing.
It should therefore interest anyone involved in defining, purchasing, building or managing a transaction
-processing environment — notably, CIOs, CTOs, infrastructure managers, database and application
architects, database administrators and IT purchasing managers.
For this Magic Quadrant, we based our analysis on information gathered from interactions with Gartner
clients over the past 12 months and our survey of the vendors' reference customers, performed during
3
July and August 2014. We also considered earlier information and any news about vendors' products,
customers and finances that arose during the analysis time frame.
Market Overview
The OLTP DBMS market, from which the operational DBMS market evolved, was very mature in the
early years of the 21st century. However, as Internet usage and availability grew, so did the
applications necessary to support the associated, growing infrastructure. Consequently, over the past
five years, many new vendors have entered this market with products to support the specialized
applications required by a new and global business arena.
Many drivers of innovation are widely accepted. New forms of data — that were previously difficult or
impossible to capture — have become available from connected devices (the Internet of Things), such
as smart meter data and machine or device data; we call this "observation data." The pervasive use of
personal devices and social media has also become a source of social- and business-related data; we
call this "interaction data." These new forms of data must now be used not only for analytics, but also
within transactions. Data from vendors' reference customers confirms this change, as 75% of the
respondents to our survey use interaction data in transactions, and over 50% use observation data in
transaction processing.3
In terms of hardware, new devices, servers, and networking, memory and storage options (to name
but a few) have proliferated. These both enable and require new ways to process the data they create
or support. For in-memory DBMSs, the amount of memory available on individual servers is already
reaching 32TB to 64TB. Organizations need to capture both structured and unstructured data for use in
transactions. Furthermore, they must use the data from transactions, observations and interactions in
real time for decision processing as part of, not separately from, the transactions. This process is the
definition of HTAP (for further details, see "Hype Cycle for In-Memory Computing, 2014").
To support the new operational DBMS market, many new vendors have emerged with innovative DBMS
engines that support transactions on a global scale, real-time transactions integrated with analytics,
streaming data transactions, and more. These new vendors are single-minded in terms of direction.
Once their ideas are proven, more mature vendors will feel obliged to adopt some of this technology.
The new vendors' activities include the use of JSON for data structures in applications; new and less
restrictive forms of consistency (allowing for eventual consistency); larger amounts of DRAM for inmemory DBMSs; and new file structures that differ from relational ones, such as those for key-value
and document-store file systems. Many of these vendors support these NoSQL systems for simplicity,
agile development, support of unstructured data types, scalability and performance. Already, an
increasing number of mature DBMS vendors are adopting these technologies in their systems.
Although we exclude cloud-only delivery from this Magic Quadrant, the cloud is being widely adopted as
a delivery platform in the operational DBMS market. Over the next few years, we expect most vendors
to offer cloud versions of their DBMS products. These will range from simple offerings of support for
infrastructure as a service and cloud hosting, to full cloud DBMS platforms with elasticity and
multitenant capabilities. As the operational DBMS market matures, cloud deployment — and especially
hybrid deployment — will become a criterion of importance as it offers users an additional platform
choice.
http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-237UHKQ&ct=141016&st=sb
3/20/2015