Database trend: more open source, less cloud and less AI

The "2025 State of the Database Landscape" study by Redgate, a provider of database management tools, reveals a few surprising trends in user sentiment over the past year: companies are reducing the number of different databases, turning their backs on pure cloud use and distrusting AI. Less surprising: open source databases are popular.

74% of the 2,500 participants surveyed stated that their company uses more than one database, compared to 76% in 2023. The number of those using four or more databases even fell from 29% to 9%. The study explains this decline by the fact that companies are "moving away from adopting just any platform for a business need and are considering which platforms they can support with their resources."

The main challenges cited by respondents when deploying multi-platforms were Team skills and training (57 percent), complexity (52 percent) and monitoring (45 percent). The primary reasons for this are different use cases (62 percent), greater flexibility (42 percent) and cost savings (34 percent).

The four most frequently used databases are Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL, whereby the study refers to data from the DB Engines Ranking. This also applies to the number of new products most frequently introduced in the last two years: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB – all open source – and Snowflake.

AI is losing users

AI support for database management is also experiencing a decline: in 2023, 20 percent of respondents were still supported by AI, whereas in 2024 this figure had fallen to just 15 percent. In 2023, 40 percent of respondents cited improved security as one of the main reasons for using AI; in 2024, only 25 percent said the same. 57% have concerns about reliability, compared to just 37% in 2023.

Looking to the future, the mood towards the intelligent helpers is somewhat more positive: 42% of companies are planning to introduce AI, compared to only 35% in 2023. The main use cases are code review (46%), query optimization (45%) and data modelling and schema design (33%). Participants see the advantages in automation (47%), efficiency (45%) and standardization (42%). A significant increase in productivity was felt by 36% of AI users and an improvement of some kind by 48%.

More on-premises and hybrid cloud use

A negative trend can also be seen in pure cloud usage: 30% of companies hosted databases completely or largely in the cloud in 2024, compared to 36% in 2023. Conversely, 34% choose on-premises (2023: 31%). The proportion of hybrid users has also risen significantly from 33% to 37%. The reasons cited by respondents for reducing cloud use were cost management (39%), privacy and security (26%) and performance issues (22%). On the other hand, scalability and flexibility (70%), high availability and reliability (62%) and cost efficiency (42%) speak in favor of cloud use. The report comments on the contradiction in the cost issue with "perhaps surprisingly" and "The big lie – cost saving in the cloud". It should be noted that Redgate tools work both with and without the cloud (as well as with and without AI).

Other topics examined in the report include training and further education in the database sector as well as testing and security. 2,500 IT professionals around the world from the IT, finance, healthcare and other sectors took part. The study does not provide any more precise data or any indication of representativeness.

Clean Architecture – Presentations and discussion at the heise conference

Our online conference betterCode() Clean Architecture will take place again on March 24. The presentations will introduce clean architecture concepts and shed light on their underlying details. The event is aimed at software architects, software developers and IT project managers who want to learn about new trends and exchange experiences with colleagues. Two full-day workshops illustrate the theory with practical exercises.

From the program:

• Is maintainability overrated?
• Architecture from below – Building the bridge between code and architecture
• From microservices to modularity – Experiences from an experiment
• Is clean the same as green? – We have measured
• DDD Cards – Getting to grips with the complexity of clean architecture in a playful way
• The future of software architecture: How GenAI and LLMs are shaping the code of tomorrow

The hands-on workshops to join in:

• Flexible application architecture with clean and hexagonal architecture (March 19)
• AI expertise for architects and developers: Prompt Engineering hands-on (March 26)

If you would like to attend, you can register for the conference now; the early bird price applies until March 2.

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