Spend time to save money or spend money to save time

Within the last few years, the industry witnessed great momentum around open source databases, from product enhancement, improved customer support and increased adoption to new vendors jumping on the bandwagon. Open source databases continue to make inroads into enterprises, offering low-cost database management system alternatives to support all types of business applications. The costs and
licensing headaches are the primary drivers of increasing deployments of open source databases, but users are also more confident in the quality of today's open source databases and the maturity and stability of their vendors.

The move was mainly within companies with tight budgets but now business asks themselves why are paying a lot of money for an Oracle or IBM or Microsoft database license for a database that only a base cost of having the staff and expertise on top to the growing number of technology companies betting their businesses on open-source database products reflects a gradual shift in corporate spending patterns. With many companies familiar with Linux, the Apache Web server and open-source development tools, databases its now being the norm to have the expertise in many business environments to the gradual shift of these systems are occurring everywhere. The expertise are taught within universities as standard and so graduates are coming to market with skills that a business can take real advantage from. They will require little further training unlike with other database systems where courses will usually have to be taken to get the expertise in driving up the cost of implementations.

The advantage of freely available software is obvious, but why is the source code availability important? Open Source software products are most often the collective effort of many volunteer programmers. Anyone can submit bug fixes, security patches, and the like. This means that bugs get fixed faster, programs are more secure, and, in general, as a program matures, it is of higher quality.

One of the primary disadvantages of open source software is that it can be user-unfriendly, and it may be difficult to find someone with expertise in the software to set it up for an organization. Also, even though the software itself may be free, it may cost you more to implement an open source software solution than to buy an off-the -shelf product, so balance the cost of proprietary software with the
potentially increased cost of implementation.

There are two primary Open Source server-based database management systems in use: MySQL and PostgreSQL. Both of these database systems run well on UNIX-based operating systems, such as Linux, as well as Windows. In general, however, Unix is the better OS for multi-user database applications because of its stability and scalability.

With this differentiation many business now make the choice of those those who are willing to spend time to save money, and those who are willing to spend money to save time will be the question that now decides in using open source databases.