Who’s Winning in Open Source Data Tech

Organizations understandably want the innovation that comes with using open source data management tech, but how do you know when it’s too green for adoption? A new survey from OpenLogic seeks the opinions of the masses in gauging what tech is being used in prime time and what’s not.

OpenLogic, which is a subsidiary of Perforce, provides professional support services for more than 400 open source technologies, ranging from MongoDB and Apache Spark to Kubernetes and Elastic. For its Open Source Trend Report, it conducted two separate surveys: one of its internal enterprise architect support staff, and another with external development professionals.

The enterprise architects survey listed some technologies that you likely already know about, as well as some names that you may not heard of. For instance, it should come as no surprise that PostgreSQL was listed in the upper-right portion of its open source data technologies quadrant (Fig 1), which measures “importance to modern development” along the Y axis and the relative maturity along the X axis.

Surrounding PostgreSQL in that quadrant were some familiar names: Apache Kafka, Apache ActiveMQ, MariaDB, Apache Camel, Apache Cassandra, Couchbase, and MongoDB. Even good old Apache Hadoop scores fairly well in terms of its maturity level and importance to modern developers. Apache Spark and Apache NiFi scored above the fold in terms of importance to modern developers, while splitting the field in terms of relative maturity.

Apache ActiveMQ Artemis, which is the codename for the HornetQ code that was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, and will eventually be the successor to Apache ActiveMQ, was deemed relatively mature, if not terribly important to modern development, while CockroachDB and Strimzi (which is Apache Kafka running on Kubernetes) occupied quadrant four with lower maturity and importance to developers.

OpenLogic Enterprise Architect Connor Penhale says the relative maturity levels are changing quickly. “There are data technologies, like Strimzi, that don’t even have a major version number yet – but are in production at large, enterprise companies,” Penhale states in the report. “For those who have the in-house expertise and developer hours to support these cutting edge data technologies early on in their lifecycle, they can leverage the benefits of these packages before many other organizations.

OpenLogic also queried 200 external developers to gauge their perceptions of open source databases along several lines, including awareness, usage, and future plans. MySQL topped the list, with the highest scores across those three metrics, followed by two other data stores, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, which were very close in ranking (see Fig 2).