>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Welcome back to Postgres Vision 21. My name is Dave Vellante. We're thrilled to welcome Carl Olofsen to theCUBE. Carl is a research vice president at IDC focused on data management. The long-time database analyst is the technologist and market observer. Carl, good to see you again. >> Thanks Dave. Glad to be here. >> All right. Let's let's get into it. Let's talk about, let's go right to the, to the source the open source database space. You know, how, what changes have you seen over the last couple of years in that marketplace? >> Well, this is a dynamic area and it's continuing to evolve. When we first saw the initial open source products like mysQl and PostgreSQL on the early days they were very limited in terms of functionality. They were espoused largely by sort of true believers. You know, people who said everything should be open source. And we saw that mainly they were being used for what I would call rather prosaic database applications. But as time has gone by they both of these products improve. Now there's one key difference, of course, which is a mySQL is company owned open source. So the IP belongs to Oracle corporation. Whereas PostgreSQL is community open source, which means that the IP belongs to the PostgreSQL community. And that can have a big difference in terms of things like licensing and so forth, which really matters now that we're coming into the cloud space because as open-source products moving into the cloud space the revenue model is based on subscriptions. And of course they are always based on subscription to open source cause you don't charge for the license. So what you charge for its support, but in the cloud what you can do is you can set up a database service, excuse me, a database service and then you charge for that service. And if it's open source or it's not open source that actually doesn't matter to the user. If you see what that I mean because they still are paying a subscription fee for a service and they get the service. The main difference between the two types is that if you're a commercial provider of PostgreSQL like enterprise DB, you don't have control over where it goes and you don't have control over the IP and how people use it in different ways. Whereas Oracle owns mySQL so they have a lot more control and they can do things to it on their own. They don't have to consult the community. Now there's also, non-relational open source including MongoDB. And as you may be aware, MongoDB has changed their license. So that it's not possible for third party to offer Mongo DB as a complete managed database service without paying a license fee to MongoDB for that. And that's because they own the IP too. And we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. I have conversations with open source all the time and they are getting a little concerned that it has become possible for somebody to simply take their technology, make a lot of money off that. And no money goes back to the community. No money goes back to the IRS. It's a company it's just stays with the supplier. So I think, you know it'll be interesting to see how all this is over time. >> So you're suggesting that the Postgres model then is, is I guess I'll use the word cleaner. And so that feels like it's a it's a benefit or is it a two-edged sword kind of thing? I mean, you were saying before, you know a company controls the IP so they could do things without having to go to the community. So maybe they can do things faster. But at the other hand like you said, you get handcuffed. You think you're going to be able to get a, you know a managed service, but then all of a sudden you're not and the rules change midstream saying it, am I correct? That Postgres, the model is cleaner for the customer? >> Well, you know, I mean, a lot of my friends who are in the open source community don't even consider company owned open source to be true open source because the IP is controlled by a company, not by a community. >> Dave: Right >> So from that perspective certainly Postgres SQL is considered, I don't know if you want to use the word cleaner or more pure or something along those lines, but also because of that the nature of community open source it can be used in many different ways. And so we see Postgres popping up all over the place sometimes partially and sometimes altogether, in other words, a service, a cloud service, we'll take a piece of Postgres and stick it on top of their own technology and offer it. And the reason they do that is they know there are a lot of developers out there who already know how to code for Postgres. So they are immediately first-class users of the service that they're offering. >> So, talk a little bit more about what you're seeing. You just mentioned a lot of different use cases. That's interesting. I didn't realize that was, that was happening. The, what are you seeing in terms of adoption in let's say the last 18, 24 months specific to Postgres? >> Yeah, we're seeing a fair amount of adoption in especially in the middle market. And of course there is rapid adoption in the tech sector. Now, why would that be? Well it's because they have armies of technologists. Who know how to program this stuff. You know, when you, you know, a lot of them will use PostgreSQL without a contract without a support contract, they'll just support themselves. And they can do that because they have the technicians who are capable of doing it. Most regular businesses can't do that. They don't have the staff so they need that support contract. And so that's where a company like enterpriseDB comes. I mentioned them only because they're the leading supplier Postgres to all their other suppliers. >> I was talking to Josh Burgers, red hat and he was, you know, he had just come off a Cubacon and he was explaining kind of what's happening in that community. Big focus of course on security and the whole, you know, so-called shift left. We were having a good discussion about, you know when does it make sense to use, you know Postgres in a container environment should you use Postgres and Kubernetes and he sort of suggested that things have rapidly evolved. There's still, you know, considerations but what are you seeing in terms of the adoption of microservices architectures containers, generally Kubernetes how has that affected the use of things like postsgres? >> So those are all different things or need to be kind of custody. >> Pick your favorite. >> They're related then. So microservices, the microservice concept is that you take an application break it up into little pieces and each one becomes a microservice that's invoked through an API. And then you have this whole structure API system that you use to drive the application and they run. They typically, they run in containers usually Kubernetes govern containers but the reason you do this and this is basically a efficiency because especially in the cloud, you want only to pay for what you use. So when you're running a microservice based application. Applications have lots of little pieces when something needs to be done, microservice fires up it does the thing that needs to be done. It goes away. You only pay for that fraction of a second that the microservice is running. Whereas in a conventional application you load this big heavyweight application. It does stop. It sets some weights with things and does more stuff and sits and waits for things. And you pay for compute for that entire period. So it's much more cost effective to use a microservices application. The thing is that microservice, the concept of microservices is based on the idea that the code is stateless but database code isn't stateless cause it has its attraction to the database which is the ultimate kind of like stateful environment right? So it's a tricky business. Most database technologies that are claimed to be container-based actually run in containers the way they run in servers. In other words, they're not microservice-based they do run in containers. And the reason they're doing that is for portability so that you can deploy them anywhere and you can move them around. But you know deploying a microservice based database is, well, it's it's a big technical project. I mean, that is hard to do. >> Right and so talk about, I mean again we're talking to Josh it was clear that that Kubernetes has evolved, you know quite rapidly at the same time there were cautions. In other words, he would say I think suggested things like, you know, there were known at one point, there were known, you know flaws and known bugs that ship the code that's been been remediated or moderated in terms of that practice but still there's there's considerations just in terms of the frequency of updates. I think he gave the example of when was the last time you know, JVM got, you know, overhauled. And so what kind of considerations should customers think about when considering them, they want the Kubernetes they want the flexibility and the agility but at the same time, if they're going to put it production, they've got to be careful, right? >> Yeah, I think you need to make sure you're using you're using functions that are well-established, you know you wouldn't want to put something into production that's new. They say, oh, here's a new, here's a new operation. Let's try that. And then, you know, you get in trouble. So you want to deal conservative that way you know, Kubernetes is open-source so and the updates and the testing and all that follows a rather slow formal process, you know from the time that the submission comes in to the time that it goes out, whereas you mentioned JVMs JV, but it was owned by Oracle. And so JVMs are managed like products. Now there's a whole sort of legal thing I don't want to get into it as to whether it's legal. They claim it's not libero third parties to build JVMs without paying a licensing. I don't want to talk about that, but it's based on a very state that has a very stable base, you know whereas this area of Kubernetes and govern containers is still rapidly evolving but this is like any technology, right? I mean, when you, if you're going to commit your enterprise to functions that run on an emerging technology then you are accepting some risk. You know, that there's no question about it. >> So we talked about the cloud earlier and the whole trend toward managed services. I mean, how does that specifically apply to Postgres? You can kind of imagine like a sidecar, a little bit of Postgres mixed in with, you know, other services. So what do you see and what do you, what's your telescope say in terms of the the Postgres adoption cloud? How do you see that progressing? >> I think there's a lot of potential. There's a lot of potential there. I think we are nowhere near the option that it should be able to achieve. I say that because for one thing, even though we analyze the future at IDC, that doesn't mean we actually know the future. So I can't say what its adoption will be but I can say that there's a lot of potential there. There's a tremendous number of Postgres developers out there. So there's a huge potential for adoption. And especially in cloud adoption, the main thing that would help that is independent. And I know that enterpriseDB has one independent a managed cloud service. So I think they do. >> Yeah I think so. >> But you know, why do I say that? I say that because alternatives these days there are some small companies that maybe they'll survive and maybe they won't, but that, you know, do you want to get involved with them or the cloud platform providers, but if you use their Postgres you're locked into that cloud platform. You know, if you use Amazon, go press on RDS, right? You're not, you become quickly locked in because you're starting using all the AWS tools that surround it to build and manage your application. And then you can't move. If you see what I mean. >> Dave: Yeah . >> They have have an RDS labor Aurora, and this is actually one of the things that it's really just a thin layer of Postgres interaction code underneath Aurora is their own product. so that's an even deeper level of commitment. >> So what has to happen for, so obviously cloud, you know, big trend. So the Postgres community then adopts the code base for the cloud. Obviously EDB has, you know hundreds of developers contributing to that, but so what does that mean to be able to run in the cloud? Is that making it cloud native? Is that extensions? Is it, you know, what technically has to occur and what has occurred and how mature is it? >> Well, so smaller user organizations are able to migrate fairly quickly cloud because most of their applications are you know, commercially purchased. They're like factories applications. When they move to the cloud, they get the SAS one and often the SAS equivalent runs on Postgres. So that's just fine. Larger enterprises are a real mess. If you've ever been in a large enterprise data center you know what I'm talking about? It's just, there's just servers and storage everywhere. There's, all these applications, databases connections. They are not moving to the cloud anytime soon. But what they are doing is setting up things like private cloud environments and applying in there. And this is a place where if you're thinking about moving to something like a Postgres you know most of these enterprises use the big commercial databases. Oracle SQLserver DB two and so forth. If you're thinking of moving from that to a a PostgreSQL development say, then the smart thing to do would be first to do all your work in the private cloud where you'd have complete control over the environment. It also makes sense still to have a commercial support contract from a vendor that you trust, because I've said this again, unless you are, you know, Cisco or somebody, you know, some super tech company that's got all the technicians you need to do the work. You really don't want to take on that level of risk. If you see that, I mean. Another advantage to working with a supplier, a support supplier, especially if you have a close, intimate relationship is they will speed your security patches on a regular basis which is really important these days, because data security is as you know, a growing concern all over the place. >> So let's stay on the skillsets for a minute. Where do you see the gaps within enterprises? What kind of expertise you mentioned, you know support contracts, what are the types of things that a customer should look for in terms of the the expertise to apply to supporting Postgres databases? >> Well, obviously you want them to do the basics that any software company does, right? You want them to provide you with regular updates and binary form that you can load and, you know test and run. You want to have the you know, 24 hour hotline you know, telephone support, all that kind of thing. I think it's also important to have a solid ability on the part of the vendor that you're working with to provide you with advice and counseling as you, especially, if you're migrating from another technology, help your people convert from what they were using to what they're going to be using. So those are all aspects that I would look for in a vendor for supporting a product like PostgreSQL. >> When you think about the migration to the cloud, you know of course Amazon talks a lot about cloud migration. They have a lot of tooling associated with that. >> Carl: Right. >> But when you step back and look at it it did to a point earlier, I mean a lot of the hardcore mission, critical stuff isn't going to move it, hasn't moved, but a lot of the fat middle, you know, is, are good candidates for it. >> Carl: Right. >> How do you think about that? And how do you look at that? I mean, obviously Oracle is trying to shove everything into OCI and they're, you know, they're all in because they realized that could make a lot of money doing that. But what do you, what are the sort of parameters that we should think about when considering that kind of migration, moving a legacy database into the cloud? >> Well, it has to be done piecemeal. You're not going to be able to do it all at once. You know, if you have hundreds of applications, you're not just you don't even want to, you know, it's a good time to take you into it. And what you've got running, ask yourself are these applications really serving the business interests today and will they in the future or is this a good time to maybe consider something else? Even if you have a packaged application, there might be one that is more aligned with your future goals. So it's important to do that. Look at your data integration, try to simplify it. You know, most data integration that most companies has done piecemeal project by project. They don't reference each other. So you have this chaos of ETL jobs and transformation rules and things like that that are just, you know, even difficult to manage. Now, just forget about any kind of migration or transformation considerations, just trying to run it now is becoming increasingly difficult. You know, maybe you want to change your strategy for doing data integration. Maybe you want to consolidate you want to put more data in one database. I'm not an advocate of the idea that you can put all application data in one database by the way, we know from bitter experience that doesn't work, but we can be rational about the kinds of databases that we use and how they sit together. >> Well, I mean, you've been following this for a long time and you saw the sort of rise and fall of the big data meme. And you know, this idea that you can shove everything into a single place, have a single version of the truth. It's like, it's just never seemed to happen. >> Carl: Right. >> So, you know, Postgres has been around a long time. It's evolved. I mean, I remember when, you know, VMware's ascendancy and people are like, okay, should I, you know should I virtualize my Postgres database is your, you know similar conversations that we were having earlier about Kubernetes. You've seen the move to the cloud. We're going to have this conversation about the edge at some point in time. So what's your outlook for Postgres, the Postgres community and, you know database market overall? >> Well, I really think the future for database growth is in the cloud. That's what all the data we're looking at and the case that's what our recent surveys indicate. As I said before, the rate of change depends on the size of the enterprise. Smaller advices are moving rapidly, large enterprises much more slowly and cautiously for the very simple reason that it's a very complex proposition. And also in some cases, they're wondering if they can move certain data or will they be violating your some sort of regulatory constraint or contractual issue. So they need to deal with those things too. That's why the private cloud is the perfect place to get started and get technology all lined up storing your data center is still under your control no legal issues there, but you can start, you know converting your applications to micro-service architected applications running in containers. You can start replacing your database servers with ones that can run in a container environment and maybe in the future, maybe hope that in the future, some of those will actually also be able to run as microservices. I don't think it's impossible but it just involves programming the database server in a very different way than we've done in the past. But you do those things. You can do those things under your own control over time in your own dataset. And then you reach a point where you want to take the elements of your application environment and say, what pieces of this, can I move to the cloud without creating disruption and issues regarding things like data egress and latency from cloud to data center and that kind of thing. And prepare for that. And then you're doing the step wise and then you start converting in a stepwise manner. I think ultimately it just makes so much sense to be in the cloud that the cloud vendors have economies of scale. They can deploy large numbers of servers and storage systems to satisfy the needs of large numbers of customers and create, you know great considerable savings. Some of which of course becomes their profit which is what's due to them. And some of that comes back to the users. So that's what I expect. We're going to see. And oh gosh, I would say that starting from about three years from now the larger enterprises start making their move and then you'll really start to see changes in the numbers in terms of cloud and cloud revenue. >> Great stuff, Carl, thank you for that. So any cool research you're working on lately, how you're spending your your work time, anything you want to plug? >> Well, working a lot on just as these questions, you know cloud migration is a hot topic, another which is really sort of off the subject. And what we've been talking about is graph database which I've been doing a fair amount of research into. I think that's going to be really important in the coming years and really, you know working with my colleagues in a project called the future of intelligence which looks at all the different related elements not just database, data integration but artificial intelligence, data communications and so on and so forth and how they come together to create a more intelligent enterprise. And that's a major initiative that I see. It's one of the, we call the future of initiatives. >> Great, Carls, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE. It's great to have you, man. I appreciate it. >> Well, I enjoyed it. Now I have to do it again sometime. >> All right you got it. All right thank you everybody for watching theCUBEs. Continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. This is Dave Vellante keep it right there. (upbeat music)