Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

The position of basic software in the software industry is like the foundation of a building, and its importance can be seen, but China's basic software market has been monopolized by foreign software giants for a long time. Domestic enterprises and users are not only restricted by foreign manufacturers in terms of use and cost, but also have many hidden dangers in information security. Therefore, how to get rid of the dependence on foreign basic software and develop excellent domestic basic software has become the focus of attention.

Recently, Gartner released a series of database reports for 2018, "Database Magic Quadrant", "Database Core competence" and "Database recommendation report". In this series of reports, we have seen five domestic database manufacturers, namely Aliyun, Huawei, Giant Sequoia Database, Tencent Cloud and Star Ring Technology. From 0 to 5, what has happened to the Gartner of domestic databases? What keywords can we extract from the database vendors that rushed into the Gartner report? Compared with the development trend predicted by Gartner, what is the current situation of domestic database development?

From 0 to 3, from 3 to 5, the Gartner road of Chinese database

Gartner is the world's leading IT research and consulting firm, which publishes various reports on the IT industry and the well-known Gartner Magic Quadrant every year. Gartner database report has a long history, but it was not until 2017 that Chinese database manufacturers first appeared in the report.

In Gartner's 2017 database series report, there are three domestic databases, namely AsparaDB, GBase and SequoiaDB, corresponding to Aliyun, NTU General purpose and Giant Sequoia databases, respectively. In this year's Gartner database series report, we found that the number of database vendors on the list has increased to 5, including two familiar Aliyun and Jushan databases, and the remaining three are Tencent Cloud, Huawei and Star Ring Technology.

Why did Chinese database manufacturers appear in the report only at this time point in 2017? As we all know, Chinese database started relatively late, and the technical requirements of database are very high. Established manufacturers such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and other established manufacturers occupy a favorable position in the market share by virtue of the first-mover advantage. Under this situation, Chinese database must need an opportunity to break through. The timely emergence of new technologies and new scenes such as Yunda Wushi has just ignited the development of Chinese databases, and the huge market and huge user groups and needs have given the soil for the development of domestic databases. Gartner saw the rapid development of Chinese database technology in the past few years and decided to include Chinese database manufacturers in the survey for the first time in 2017.

"from 0 to 3, from 3 to 5", this is just the beginning of the road of Chinese database Gartner. In fact, with the continuous fermentation of topics such as "IOE" and data security, there are many start-ups and cross-border players in China's database field, and there are not a few "capable" among them. In view of the fact that Gartner has just included China in the scope of the survey and the complexity of the survey (including technological advancement, product maturity, market size, revenue status, enterprise application cases and global layout, etc.), many manufacturers are too late to participate. I believe we can see more Chinese database manufacturers in future reports. In the face of Gartner's strict selection criteria and complex selection process, although Giant Sequoia Database has been selected into the Gartner database report twice in a row, CTO Wang Tao could not help "complaining" in an interview: "just preparing to evaluate the materials of the Gartner report will take a lot of time and effort, which is really a 'big project' ah!"

Read the Gartner database report carefully, what keywords can we extract?

From the whole process of database development, China's database development started late, but the development speed is very fast, and China has many scenarios that promote the development of database technology that foreign countries do not have, such as Singles' Day. If we look horizontally at the five shortlisted manufacturers in the Gartner report, there are a lot of keywords on paper.

Key word one: original

According to the relevant data, in the past few years, there are hundreds of new manufacturers and products in the database field. From the domestic point of view, the enthusiasm of the whole database research and development is also very high, not only focusing on the database manufacturers, but also big data, cloud computing manufacturers across the border.

Judging from the database products selected for Gartner reports, more than 90% of them are developed from scratch. If we focus on the five selected domestic manufacturers, the financial distributed database SequoiaDB of Giant Sequoia Database and the new generation relational database POLARDB of Aliyun are completely self-developed.

Keyword 2: open source

When selecting products, Gartner does not stipulate that DBMS must be closed-source products, and open source DBMS products with commercial support are also included, so we also see many vendors that provide commercial support for open source databases in the report, such as a variety of database services provided by major cloud computing vendors. Of course, there are many self-research database manufacturers choose to open source their own products, SequoiaDB is one of them.

So is the open source database only making great strides in technology, and how is its profitability? In response, Gartner also commented that "open source-based DBMS products will account for more than 20% of DBMS's total revenue by 2020, and will become more attractive to mainstream buyers."

Keyword 3: customer evaluation

Customer evaluation is an important dimension for Gartner to select products or manufacturers. The author believes that the customer evaluation here can be divided into two parts, one part is whether the product richness is enough for customers to choose, and the other is whether the products and services can be highly valued by customers after deployment.

Generally speaking, cloud computing vendors will provide relatively rich database services. Take Aliyun as an example, Gartner clearly wrote in its advantages: "with a wide range of product portfolios, Aliyun is the cloud service provider (CSP) with the largest DBMS service portfolio in MagicQuadrant." It can be said that Ali Yun can be selected, rich database services absolutely occupy an important contribution.

In the second kind of customer evaluation, Gartner often makes a return visit according to the customer list provided by the manufacturer, during which the customer will be asked a lot of detailed questions and scored accordingly. A typical vendor in this area is the Giant Sequoia Database. According to the Gartner report, SequoiaDB received the highest survey score for the quality of end-user training among all suppliers, and almost all of the survey scores were above average, achieving the third highest score for overall customer satisfaction. The part of customer evaluation is also highlighted in the 2017 Gartner evaluation of the giant sequoia database.

Key word 4: cloud

A prominent feature of this year's Gartner database report is the rise in the overall status of cloud computing vendors and challenges to traditional database vendors such as Oracle. From a domestic point of view, the enthusiasm of cloud computing manufacturers in database research and development is indeed high, and Aliyun, Tencent Cloud and China all provide about dozens of database services for them.

It is precisely because of the emergence of the cloud that Chinese databases have the opportunity to break through the existing database pattern. Cloud database on-demand expansion, on-demand billing and other features enable it to obtain customers of small and medium-sized enterprises and Internet enterprises. And this kind of customer and industry cut-in, will also reverse promote the development of database technology.

Wolf nature VS gap, Gartner forecast is in line with the development of domestic databases?

For the future development of the database, Gartner puts forward four major planning assumptions:

By 2019, the separation of storage and computing designed for the cloud database management system architecture will become the mainstream database platform as a service model (dbPaaS), and local services will also begin to emerge.

Open source-based DBMS products will account for more than 20% of DBMS's total revenue by 2020 and will become more attractive to mainstream buyers.

By 2020, relational technology will continue to be used in at least 70% of new applications and projects.

By 2023, 75% of the databases will be on the cloud, a change that will revolutionize the DBMS vendor landscape.

For the domestic situation of these four major planning assumptions, the author verified from the giant sequoia database CTO Wang Tao: first of all, the giant sequoia database product SequoiaDB itself adopts the architecture of storage and computing separation, it can be said that the storage-computing separation architecture has appeared local services in China. Second, for the prediction of the revenue of open source DBMS products and the application of relational technology, Wang Tao believes that if it is achieved in a domestic scenario, it may be completed ahead of schedule; third, the cloud on the database is more in accordance with each enterprise's service customer group and development plan, but it is undeniable that Shangyun will be a new growth point for database manufacturers.

If we compare the Chinese market with the market forecast of Gartner, the development of the technology and application of Chinese database is obviously more "wolf nature" and the breakthrough speed is faster, but the "gap" accumulated by history still exists.

Lack of overseas market share: this is a common fault of Chinese database manufacturers. Most of their business is in China. Although there are also manufacturers building data centers abroad, the overall market share abroad is very low. And there are many products and functions provided in China that are not available globally.

The ability of self-research is still weak: it is undeniable that the technical barrier of database is high, but it is also a fact that the technical ability of self-research of domestic database manufacturers still needs to be improved. Gartner evaluates the products of other suppliers mainly provided by Tencent Cloud, rather than its own.

Function and cost support: there is still a gap between domestic cloud computing manufacturers and foreign giants in terms of supporting the richness of database services, and they are not so in line with expectations in terms of cost. In the Gartner survey, some respondents also put forward high cost and uneven support.

On the whole, although the domestic database is difficult to compete with the international big companies in terms of market share, its development speed and technical strength in some scenarios have been in the leading level. The selected Gartner database report is a good example.

Attachment: evaluation of domestic database manufacturers by Gartner report

Aliyun is a global cloud computing company headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and its international business is located in Singapore. It provides a variety of services, such as ApsaraDB (AlibabaCloud AliSQL-based) for RDS (Relational Database Service) for MySQL, Redis version of SQL Server and PostgreSQL; cloud databases, and HybridDB;ElasticMapReduceforHadoop for POLARDB; MySQL and PostgreSQL. In addition, ApsaraStack provides local private cloud facilities.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, China, Huawei is worth billions of dollars and provides Huawei cloud database services for MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Memcached, Redis and document Database Services (DDS). Although DDS does not meet the cross-location distribution requirements of the selected Magic Quadrant, Huawei is expanding rapidly in the Chinese market and has begun to expand into other regions. Among the customers surveyed, DDS rarely competes with non-Asian suppliers other than AWS and Oracle. DDS scored high in user surveys, with high scores in pricing methods, integration and deployment, services and support, and training. In addition, it also got the highest score in automatic data allocation, high-speed data acquisition and transaction processing.

Giant sequoia database SequoiaDB, headquartered in Guangzhou, China, provides open source, high availability, distributed multi-mode DBMS (based on document [JSON] storage model), designed for scale distribution and flexible expansion. SequoiaDB supports a block storage engine for content management use cases, a complete SQL engine, perfect compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and support for JSONAPI. SequoiaDB set up a laboratory in North America and began to expand the global market. Among all the selected vendors, SequoiaDB scored above average in many items and got the third highest score in enterprise customer evaluation, which was particularly appreciated by customers for their distributed and data management capabilities.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, China, Tencent Cloud provides Tencent Cloud database services, including deployment of MySQL,MariaDB, SQLServer,PostgreSQL,Redis,Memcached,MongoDB,CTSDB,TiDB and Greenplum. In addition, it plans to provide Oracle, SQLServer, and Db2 migration tools and compatibility. Because Tencent offers products from other suppliers rather than its own, Tencent is not included in this year's MagicQuadrant. Although Tencent Cloud has data centers in North America, South America, Europe, Japan and Australia, most of its business is in China. The customers surveyed scored below average on Tencent Cloud's overall satisfaction, value, product capabilities, end-user training (some comments said that the documentation of the data migration service needed to be improved), and the simplicity of programming. In the pricing method, the integration and deployment scores reached the average score. Respondents gave positive comments on its pricing, service and support (often considered "free"), professional services, security performance and high-speed transaction processing.

Headquartered in Shanghai, China, Star Ring Technology provides Hyperbase, a multimode operable DBMS that supports document data types in JSON or XML, as well as spatial data types and object storage. Hyperbase built on top of Apache HBase also includes a SQL engine that is partially compatible with OraclePL/SQL. Hyperbase is part of the Transwarp data center, which includes a variety of data management technologies, such as streaming, search and analytical DBMS. Customers think highly of Transwarp as a whole, especially in terms of ease of operation and programming as well as professional services.

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