Database professionals responded to a survey from Percona regarding changes in database strategies. The research indicates that most organizations are not planning to make significant alterations to their database strategies over the course of the next three years.

The study sheds light on a number of database operations concerns for organizations, including challenges around developer agility, and significant factors driving the choice between deploying open source or proprietary databases.

More than 70% of respondents say they are doing somewhat or extremely well with database reliability, performance, security, privacy, scalability and backup reliability and integrity. Conversely, meeting the needs of developers placed last on the list of 14 operational metrics collected, with 55% of respondents saying they are doing well in developer agility.

Large enterprises are much more likely to use database monitoring and management solutions, with 93% of organizations having such tools in place. Fifty-seven percent of small businesses have database monitoring and management solutions deployed. Small companies are much more likely to use on-premises and cloud services to host their databases (49%) compared to 26% of large enterprises. Large enterprises are also much more likely to use DBaaS offerings (32% of deployments).

Further findings include:

• When asked about what drove their choice to use open source databases, respondents most often cited cost reductions (83% rated as somewhat or extremely significant) and developer choice (81%), followed by faster deployment (75%) and then security and more control (73% each).
• For respondents that implemented proprietary databases, the biggest factors are greater stability (68%), more security (63%) and regulatory compliance (61%).
• 99% of respondents run at least one relational database, and 86% run at least one non-relational database.