Database Market Overview

The database market is experiencing a multi-decade disruption from relational dominance to polyglot persistence.

Market Structure

• Total Market: ~$80B (including cloud services)
• Growth: Cloud databases growing 25%+ annually
• Trend: Managed services overtaking self-hosted

Category Breakdown

Cloud Database Wars

AWS: Aurora, DynamoDB, RDS
GCP: Spanner, BigQuery, AlloyDB
Azure: Cosmos DB, SQL Database

Emerging Trends

• Serverless databases: Pay-per-query pricing
• Edge databases: Data at the edge (Turso, Fly.io)
• AI-native: Vector + relational convergence

Database Competitive Dynamics

The PostgreSQL Phenomenon

PostgreSQL has become the default choice for new projects:

• Open source, no licensing cost
• Extensibility (PostGIS, pgvector, etc.)
• Enterprise-grade reliability
• Strong community

Vendor Strategies

1. Cloud Lock-in

Cloud vendors offer proprietary features:

Aurora: Custom storage engine
Spanner: Global consistency
Cosmos DB: Multi-model API

These create migration friction by design.

2. Developer Experience

Modern databases compete on DX:

• Instant provisioning
• Branching (Neon, PlanetScale)
• Local development parity

3. Operational Simplicity

Managed services win by removing:

• Backup management
• Scaling decisions
• Security patching
• High availability setup

Switching Barriers

Database migrations are among the highest-risk infrastructure changes.