Case Study: Databases - History

Given my background I figured databases were a good place to develop and use innovation theory. This industry is showing clear signals of change for a while now.

I plan to apply the theory of innovation as presented by Clayton Christensen in "Seeing What's Next".

A quick database historical summary:

Databases are software for managing data and information within organizations. The industry took off when the first relational databases were developed. Databases are one of the most important IT parts of any company. The recent explosion of Open Source software has lead to a couple of new database vendors.

I am going to concentrate on Oracle, Microsoft SQLserver and MySQL.

Oracle was one of the first companies to introduce a relational database. It has followed the innovation path of increasing features and better performance for the most demanding customers, basically following the classic trajectory. Oracle is rightly seen as an industry leader in databases, delivering cutting edge functionality and performance to the enterprise market.

Microsoft SQL server partnered with Sybase to produce an relational database product for its move into the enterprise server market. Following its bundling strategy which has worked well in other areas of software it provided a complete server/database solution. This strategy also provided a smooth path to upgrade for companies which had outgrown the Microsoft Access database on individual PCs.

MySQL is a "free" software database released under GPL. As the Open Source/Free software movement increased with the release of different similar licensed Unix distributions (Linux, Open BSD) the use of MySQL increased. The ability to have a database which could be queried using SQL enabled people who couldn't or wouldn't afford a database to now use a database.

So we have an industry leader, servicing the most demanding customers with good margins and we have two other companies both attacking from below, with products which in the beginning were not good enough for those demanding customers.

I am going to look more closely at the signals of change in the next blog.

Have Fun

Paul