Enterprise Roadmap: Cloud Analytic Databases 2019

1. Summary

The world of data is rapidly changing. Data is the prime foundational component of any meaningful corporate initiative. Managing and evaluating this prime asset is ongoing continually in competitive organizations. The incorporation of new information into this process is required, and tradeoffs must be considered in the decision-making process.

While alternative forms of database storage have rapidly ascended to stake claims to modern workloads, relational database vendors have not been sitting around yielding ground. To the contrary, relational databases are as viable as ever and are clearly a huge part of not only the legacy environment, but future data environments as well. Relational database offerings have responded aggressively to the competition. While alternative platforms are growing with the data tsunami, and have their place, workload platforming decisions today highly consider and usually choose the relational database, and for good reason.

A large part of the allure can be found in the cloud integrations of the product grouping for this report. Use of the cloud has become paramount to corporate efficiency and solutions that embody a solution tightly integrated with the cloud provide value.

This report focuses on relational analytical databases in the cloud. Cloud deployments are at an all-time high and poised to expand dramatically. The cloud offers opportunities to differentiate and innovate with these database systems at a much more rapid pace than ever before. Further, the cloud has been a disruptive technology, as cloud storage enables rapid server deployment, and offers elastic scalability when compared with on-premise deployments. For these reasons many data-driven companies are increasingly migrating to the cloud.

With over half of corporations operating under some form of “cloud mandate,” the expectations for analytic cloud databases are high. They mostly deliver – as this report will attest.

Last year this report focused on comparing vendors on key decision criteria that were primarily targeted at cloud integration. The vectors represented how well the products provided the features of the cloud that corporate customers have come to expect. In 2017 we chose products with cloud analytic databases that exclusively deploy in the cloud, or had undergone major renovation for cloud deployments. This report is an update to the 2017 Sector Roadmap: Cloud Analytic Databases and, as such, continues with an analysis of the same vendors.

We still believe that cloud integration remains a work in progress and a primary decision point for an effective analytic cloud database selection.