Forget developers, today’s kingmakers are called architects, and studies continue to indicate that different technologies are adopted if architects’ preferences are followed.
A prime example is databases. Architects usually choose the database technology used for new applications at 41% of organizations according to Percona’s “2020 Open Source data Management Software Survey.” Developers make these decisions at 26% of organizations, while only 16% of database administrators (DBAs) have the responsibility. People can perform multiple job functions, so some developers architect the same databases they manage, and some DBAs with programming skills are morphing into so-called data engineers. As career arcs change, perhaps people will self-identify with the architect job title because those are the people that are the decision-makers.
The New Stack conducted a custom analysis of the Percona study’s data set to see which databases are preferred by different job roles. Percona has long provided a commercial version of MySQL, so unsurprisingly 91% of organizations surveyed utilize a MySQL compatible database. For this reason, we filtered based on these criteria to create a chart showing how the adoption of databases varies based on who tends to be responsible for choosing the data technology for new applications.
Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server is used less often at organizations where developers usually choose database technologies. DBA-centric organizations are most likely to be using these two non-open source options, but many architects also appear to work at places with these legacy footprints. Interestingly, DBAs appear to prefer Cassandra more often, but this may be the result of a large number of Cassandra open source community contributors participating in the survey.
The adoption of several databases is much lower at organizations where management makes technology decisions. This sub-set of respondents may not consider data stores Redis, Elastic Search and Kafka when thinking about databases. Another explanation is that these technologies are just not on their radars.
This may be the case in for developers and Kafka.
