Is open source database a viable solution?

Please read the article at this link.

What do you think? Is open source database a viable solution?

The link says (as quoted by Forrester) that the market share for

• Open source database is at $850 million
• Commercial databases is $ 16 billion

Key take aways from this article:

1. Many vendors are now open to the idea of a open source database. I personally feel small and medium sized enterprises are the ones who would be keen on it.
2. Forrester says the open source databases available today are capable of handling 80% of applications today. That to me is a surprisingly high number.

In my opinion, this is an interesting area for the future. Today we have a few reliable open source databases like

1. Postgre SQL
2. MySQL

But open source has its own advantages and disadvantages. Below are a few that I can think of.

Advantages:

1. Cheap / free to use and deploy.
2. Is almost capable of handling all small enterprise applications.

Disadvantages:

1. Very difficult to migrate from a commercial database to open source as of today. Can change soon.
2. Though database itself is cheap, sometimes the cost of maintaining it is high. And finding resources capable of working on an open source database is a challenge.
3. Post implementation support can be a challenge. But it is improving.
4. Lack of proper case studies and published implementations make enterprises skeptical of open source.
5. Awareness and confidence is poor.

As a parting thought, the article also rightly says that companies should try the open source way for small to medium sized applications that are NON-MISSION-CRITICAL and evaluate the database first. If found satisfactory, they should migrate to an open source database for their other applications.