The Forrester Wave™: Open Source Databases, Q2 2006

Many enterprises are turning to open source databases to reduce database management cost and avoid vendor lock-in. The maturity level of open source databases is at its highest level ever, with more choices, better support, and comprehensive ecosystems. To assess the state of the open source database market and see how the projects stack up against each other, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of six leading open source database projects across approximately 90 criteria. The result: Ingres, MySQL, and PostgreSQL are the Leaders, while Derby, Firebird, and Oracle are Strong Performers. Ingres, Oracle, and PostgreSQL offer strong support for transactional processing, while Oracle and MySQL offer strong support for embedded database platforms. For data warehouses, none of the projects offer strong native data warehouse-related features, but some third-party vendors help fill the gap with their extended solution offering for open source databases.