Structured RDBMS Remains Popular Among Corporate Users

A study, commissioned by Dell Software, shows traditional relational database management systems remains popular among corporate users despite claims and hype to the contrary.

Although many various industry reports and prognosticators have stated that unstructured data is growing explosively, fueling the urgent need for technologies to work with it, structured data remains relevant, if not essential, to organizations.

Structured data is now growing at a rate faster than unstructured data, according to the report.

Structured Data Remains Popular

Dell Software found:

Although the growth of unstructured data has garnered most of the attention, [our] survey shows structured data growing at an even faster rate.…While more than one-third of respondents indicated that structured data is growing at a rate of 25 percent or more annually, fewer than 30 percent of respondents said the same about their unstructured data.

Unstructured data is making significant advances and the technologies for manipulating and analyzing it continue to improve; however, most organizations are now focused on managing structured data, according to the report, “and will do so for the foreseeable future.

More than two-thirds of enterprises surveyed reported that structured data constitutes 75 percent of the data being managed by their organization. Roughly a third of those organizations polled stated they are not yet managing unstructured data at all.

These findings are supported by Gartner analysts. They found 91 percent of the organizations surveyed for a report released in October 2015 stated they use relational database management systems. Beyond that, 45 percent are using key-value stores (Redis, Memcached, etc.); 38 percent are using document-style database management systems (MongoDB, CouchDB, etc.); 22 percent table-style database management systems (Cassandra, HBase etc.); and 16 percent are using graph-style database management systems (Neo4j, Titan etc.).

There are many reasons supporting the continued use of relational database management systems. As Tech Target notes:

They’re practicable across a wide variety of use cases. Their sound theoretical foundation helps protect and ensure ongoing access to data for multiple types of applications.…Most types of middleware, software integration products and management tools are available for the RDBMS; however, this isn’t the case for other, emergent forms of DBMS products. The relational DBMS is the lynchpin of most existing IT systems and applications, and will continue to dominate the database landscape for years to come.

Relational database management systems remain atop the November 2015 DB-Engines Ranking of the popularity of 283 different database management systems. The list, which is updated monthly, is topped by Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. The non-relational databases ranked in the top 10 are MongoDB (4), Cassandra (8), and Redis (10).

This aligns with the Dell Software findings, which showed 78 percent of respondents are running mission-critical data on the Oracle RDBMS; roughly 72 percent are using Microsoft SQL Server at about 72 percent. The most used NoSQL database cited in the survey is MongoDB.

The Dell study, conducted by Unisphere Research, surveyed roughly 300 database administrators and others working with data in corporate environments.

Finding the Right Database Solution

Of course, relational databases are not a solution uniformly for every organization. If your organization is starting with a blank slate, there may be other technologies and other options you’ll want to explore along with relational databases.

Datavail can help. To learn more about our remote database services and how our experts can help with your ongoing database operations, please contact Datavail to discuss a custom solution designed for your enterprise. Our relational database experts can help provide the support and services you need to successfully work with your relational database.