After all, there was Great Bridge inviting business IT managers and analysts to hotel seminars across the country, flush with success stories about how Great Bridge PostgreSQL trounced other OSDBs and beat or matched proprietary databases on benchmark tests. And there were Great Bridge slides to show banner logos of corporate customers and price comparison tables, as speakers evangelized on the supreme sense of moving off budget-gouging Oracle solutions to Great Bridge database solutions for any company seeking cost-effective IT planning.

Over in Canada, PostgreSQL Inc. was gaining traction with small and medium organizations rather than the large corporate targets coveted by Great Bridge, while NuSphere was there to tout MySQL products and services. And MySQL AB in Sweden, proud of its roots in MySQL server source code, was widening its reputation, too, for lightning-quick database technology.

By September, high notes soured. Great Bridge tanked. NuSphere and MySQL AB were arguing publicly with claims and counterclaims over unfair business practices. And reports in the trade press pointed to IT managers with database purchasing power who, bereft of documentation and still leery about prospects of support, remained reluctant to cross the divide from proprietary mainstays to Open Source beginnings.

Charlie Garry of the META Group is among the most unflinchingly cautious analysts who won’t bang the drum loudly for OSDB readiness, and it looks as if he is not planning to waver from this position any time soon. Garry says that based on the corporate people he talks to Open Source database systems will not be a factor through the next five years and even beyond in the DBMS market. Garry holds nothing against Open Source. “In fact, we would like to see a database market that’s more competitive,” he states. “Frankly, I wish Open Source were more of a viable option but it will take a number of years.”

How many years?

Garry does not believe that Open Source database companies can compete with the performance, maturity, and functionality of the commercial vendors. What’s more, prospective corporate buyers need assurance of third-party vendor application support. And there’s another reason the migration is not likely: Switching and what it costs a corporation in time and price.

“DBMS switching costs are significant,” he states. “Switching takes as much as a year and might cost $1 million or more, when you consider application code, triggers, stored procedures, and the business customer’s need to develop new skill sets.” All these factors, he believes, combine to make the move to Open Source in the near future less likely. One needs to understand that this will be a slow adoption rate, as the organization will also need to also take a while to build up the support infrastructure around a specific platform, he adds.

Last July, Charlie Garry signaled strong notes of caution about Open Source DBMS in the META Group report that he authored, “Doors Still Closed to Open Source Databases,” for IT Management. What he stressed in that article, and the point he still holds true in conversations with Open, is that databases are, well, no joke.

Database priorities offer no wiggle room for bad decisions. The corporate decision over the right database management system is weighty. Maturity, reliability, and scalability need to be carefully scrutinized. And the DBMS must be, to use an industry marketing term, bullet-proof. Database systems are the kinds of assets that IT buyers feel compelled to resort to, in their goal to carry out their jobs.

“Much of my findings are not based on quantitative surveys as much as they are my daily interactions with corporate clients,” explains Garry. “I speak to six to seven clients each day five days a week, and in the case of Open Source database system adoptions, the majority are management, a few DBAs, in medium to large organizations, with the emphasis on large.”

Still, with all the hard truths about database skittishness among IT corporate planners, there are economic and technology forces in businesses today that make business customers glued to the radar screens, watching products offered as Open Source database systems and related applications.

“Faced with the costs in purchasing an Oracle system, our clients are looking at all alternatives, Open Source being just one of them,” says Garry. “Systems from Microsoft and IBM have been key, though I do get calls from people wanting to investigate MySQL”

Taking this Open Source in the Wings theme further, consultant Nancy Stewart in May reported and analyzed important findings from Survey.com, which was looking at smaller business’ practices in developing and implementing data warehousing and business intelligence solutions.

Some highlights from her summary:

 Small businesses are more receptive than larger businesses to new and alternative products. While PostgreSQL and MySQL register no significant impact on the market, they are popular with smaller businesses, which may eventually boost their presence to more significant numbers.  Linux use is noteworthy: Just behind Solaris and just ahead of HP-UX, Linux was running 9% of solutions under 100GB.  Small businesses are spending on average $124,000 annually on data warehousing and business intelligence solutions. While large business spending will grow only about 1.6 times, small-business spending will increase threefold in the next two years (with Open Source components now among the new choices at their disposal).

META Group’s Garry, meanwhile, holds another scenario as possible: Major proprietary vendors eventually bundling an Open Source database system with their Linux offerings. As for now, he sees the OSDBs as being used for tasks not deemed mission critical, such as keeping directories and logging clickstreams. As for building greater corporate confidence in what Open Source database systems can do, Garry advises corporate planners interested in Open Source database systems to dip their toes in the water first:

“Download the software, write some non-critical applications to build expertise, and investigate the numbers of tools to support it. Understand firsthand how support for Open Source works.”