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Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management

Systems
18 December 2023 - ID G00784704 - 75 min read

By Adam Ronthal, Rick Greenwald, and 4 more

With continued innovation and increased breadth and depth of function, the cloud database
management systems market continues to provide new business benefits. This Magic Quadrant
will help data and analytics leaders make the right cloud DBMS choices in this highly dynamic
market.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2025, 90% of new data and analytics deployments will be through an established data ecosystem,
causing consolidation across the data and analytics market.

By 2025, 55% of IT will adopt data ecosystems, consolidating the vendor landscape by 40%, thereby
reducing cost while reducing choice.

By 2027, 75% of DBMS purchases will be made by line-of-business domain leaders, up from 55% in
2022.

By 2027, worldwide enterprise spend on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service
(PaaS) will triple, compared with spend in 2022, thereby driving demand for database platform as a
service (dbPaaS).

By 2027, relational database management system (RDBMS) offerings will feature 80% of the practical
functionality of their NoSQL competitors, up from 60% in 2022.

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines the market for cloud database management systems (DBMSs) as the market for
software products that store and manipulate data and that are primarily delivered as software as a
service (SaaS) in the cloud. Cloud DBMSs may optionally be capable of running on-premises, or in
hybrid, multicloud or intercloud configurations. They can be used for transactional work and/or
analytical work. They may have features that enable them to participate in a wider data ecosystem.

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Cloud DBMSs help organizations execute optimization strategies to support transactional and/or
analytical processing for the following use cases:

Online transaction processing (OLTP) transactions: This use case has a centralized transaction
focus, with fixed, stable schema. High speed, high volume, concurrency, data insert/update
capabilities, atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) properties, and security are
important.

Lightweight transactions: This use case supports very high volumes of simple transactions with
high concurrency, potentially with relaxed consistency. It may involve the ability to process fast-
moving events captured from the edge.

Operational intelligence: This use case requires the ability to handle large numbers of concurrent
users running short analytic queries, while still meeting appropriate performance SLAs for
operational workloads. It relates to transactional databases that can perform predictive model
execution and online analytical processing (OLAP, formerly known as augmented transactions). It
also relates to analytical databases that can support large numbers of users running highly
concurrent workloads of simple queries.

Traditional data warehouse: This use case manages structured historical data from multiple
sources in a single DBMS instance. Data is structured to make it flexibly available to a wide variety
of other use cases and support high performance.

Logical data warehouse: This use case manages the variety and volume of structured data and
other types of content data, acting as a logical tier for a variety of data sources, internal and
external. Data is distributed across multiple platforms and/or repositories. Increasingly, this use
case will involve analytics across the data ecosystem.

Data lake and machine learning: This use case involves the storage and processing of data of all
different structures. It encompasses data engineering, data science and other use cases, at scale.

A cloud DBMS must support at least one of the use cases listed above.

Must-have capabilities for this market include:

Availability as SaaS on provider-managed public or private cloud systems.

Management of data within cloud storage — that is, cloud DBMSs are not hosted in infrastructure
as a service (IaaS), such as in a virtual machine or a container managed by the customer.

Standard capabilities for this market include:

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The ability to persist data within storage controlled by the cloud DBMS itself, rather than the ability
to handle data “in flight.”

The ability for cloud DBMSs to stand in their own right as data management components that
store, read, update and manage data. This is in contrast to systems embedded within other
software, such as business intelligence tools.

The ability to support transactional or analytical database operations, or both.

Optional capabilities for this market include:

Support for multiple data models and data types — relational, nonrelational (document, key value,
wide column, graph), geospatial, time series and others.
Magic Quadrant

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Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. As one of the global prominent cloud service
providers, its DBMS offerings include Alibaba Cloud ApsaraDB for RDS (Relational Database Service)
and PolarDB for operational use cases. For analytical use cases, it offers AnalyticDB and
MaxCompute. It also provides Lindorm, Graph Database (GDB) and Tair for nonrelational and real-
time use cases. Alibaba Cloud’s operations are primarily based in China, but it also has a presence in
Asia/Pacific and Japan, Middle East, Europe and North America, and its global headquarters are in
Singapore. Its DBMS customers cover a wide range of industries and different organization scales.

Strengths

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Leading cloud-native DBMS innovations: Alibaba Cloud has been generously investing in cloud-
native DBMS capabilities such as more flexible resource elasticity, augmented FinOps and hybrid
cloud capabilities. These continuous innovations have shifted the vendor from a cloud DBMS
follower to a provider of original native cloud solutions.

Broad and differentiated vertical presence: Alibaba Cloud has delivered DBMS success stories in a
wide range of industries including finance, public sector, retail, gaming and automotive. At the
same time, its deep engagement in some forefront industrial applications (such as autopilot)
makes it highly competitive in specific data-intensive use cases.

Ecosystem enhancement: Alibaba Cloud’s recent enhanced partnership with independent software
vendors (ISVs), such as MongoDB, ClickHouse and PingCAP, has demonstrated improvement in its
cloud ecosystem. This provides more choice in third-party D&A solutions with less integration
effort on Alibaba Cloud.

Cautions
Less coherent product portfolio: Alibaba Cloud has made some improvements to unify its diverse
D&A products including DBMS from different open-source engines. However, the market
recognition of its D&A products as a coherent brand is still lagging compared to its global peers.

Organizational restructuring uncertainty: Alibaba Group has announced the decision to split into
six business entities with respective business independence, including Alibaba Cloud. The
transitioning spin-off process as well as potential IPO bring a certain extent of uncertainty to its
business strategy for the next one to two years.

Geopolitical headwinds: Although clearly not something it can control, overall geopolitical tensions
remain high, which impacts Alibaba Cloud’s global business expansion, especially in North
America and Europe. This usually manifests as data security, data sovereignty or other local digital
compliance concerns.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers a comprehensive suite of
database services with over 15 purpose-built engines to support operational, transactional, analytical
and streaming applications. AWS’s extensive selection of database services supports a broad
spectrum of customer needs, encompassing both specialized demands and extensive use cases,
delivering scalability, flexibility, and a variety of options to both small and large enterprises. AWS is
the world’s largest cloud service provider with a global reach, dedicated industry teams and service
delivery partners to help organizations migrate their databases to AWS. It also provides extended
AWS-based solutions through continuous improvements and innovation to deliver the scale, latency,
security, compliance and integration needs of its customers.

Strengths

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Continued market presence leadership: AWS’s global presence, extensive offerings and services,
paired with the community of partners, third-party tools and services, deliver complete, compliant
and secured database applications and solutions across a wide variety of organizations.

Flexible database engines and models: AWS provides purpose-built database engines to support
diverse data models, including relational, key-value, document, in-memory, graph, time series, wide
column and ledger databases. This flexibility, and interoperability between the databases, helps
users choose the best-fit databases for building their applications.

Resources to integrate data ecosystem: AWS has the resources to move toward a more integrated
set of solutions, building on the work started with Amazon DataZone, a common metadata
framework and integration between services.

Cautions
Limited offerings beyond AWS cloud: AWS offers data and query connectors through native
services such as Amazon Athena, AWS Glue and Amazon AppFlow across on-premises and other
clouds. However, AWS customers continue to rely upon third-party solutions for unified and
complex data management and orchestration for data spanning across hybrid and multicloud.

Breadth of choice of services adds to complexity: AWS’s breadth of choices and extensive
services offerings provide flexibility and interoperability, as noted in the Strengths section above.
However, it can be overwhelming for some as it requires a significant effort to integrate data
across its broad range of service offerings. AWS has continued to progress in this area but hasn’t
fully mitigated the complexity of managing the overall cloud platform.

Alleviating lock-in concerns: Clients considering AWS must ensure alignment with specific long-
term needs and constraints, particularly with leading cloud providers like AWS, as they offer
comprehensive services for a complete end-to-end data ecosystem deployment that bring
stickiness. This may create a degree of dependence and lock-in; however, the general myths about
lock-in don’t reflect the reality of current cloud environments. AWS adopts and supports open
formats and standards for ease of portability. Also, the cost and complexity of switching to a
different environment often outweighs the risks of remaining in the incumbent environment,
however complex it may be.

Cloudera

Cloudera is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) runs on AWS, Azure,
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Red Hat OpenShift. The data ecosystem comprises distributed
storage and processing layers with multiple engines to support transactional and analytics
workloads. Cloudera continues to invest in its open-source leadership to drive innovation through the
community with open standards in its data ecosystem delivering portable data and AI services
across all cloud data architectures. With a centralized control plane across all clouds and on-

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premises, it delivers integrated security, metadata and governance with applied observability and an
open data ecosystem. Cloudera serves multiple industries and geographies.

Strengths
Hybrid and multicloud with scale: Cloudera’s value proposition is to deliver a scalable data
platform in both hybrid and multicloud deployments. Cloudera is a major driver of and contributes
a significant portion of its R&D to open-source projects to drive enterprise extensions. Cloudera
customers have petabytes of data under management.

Portable deployment strategy: Cloudera’s portable deployment strategy lets organizations run
workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments without redevelopment, eliminating
significant effort, potential errors and increased costs. It is primarily helpful for organizations
where privacy, security and other regulations force them to refrain from moving or replacing their
workloads. It provides the flexibility to run governed workloads between on-premises and clouds.

Flexible and frictionless billing: Cloudera’s frictionless application of customer investment across
any deployment model allows the free exchange of credits and subscriptions based on a common
unit, regardless of whether it is purchased directly from Cloudera or through marketplaces.

Cautions

Core offerings and complexity: CDP customers continue to have challenges in navigating the
complexity of its core offerings with its breadth of capabilities. However, the integrated security,
metadata and governance with applied observability with SDX experience simplifies the user
experience and cloud, hybrid and intercloud deployments.

More competing choices available: All cloud service providers (CSPs) offer alternatives that
compete with Cloudera’s offerings, frequently in a delivery form factor that is more tightly
integrated with the CSP ecosystem and easier to use. However, Cloudera’s strong focus on
multicloud and hybrid operations with ease of portability on workloads is an effective
counterbalance to this competitive pressure that will require sustained effort to remain effective.

Operational use cases: Cloudera is well-known for its portfolio of analytics capabilities and not as
well-known for its operational capabilities with Apache HBase and the SQL interface supported by
Apache Phoenix. Cloudera is typically not used as a general-purpose operational DBMS. It is more
prevalent in high-volume, lightweight transaction lookups and large-scale batch operations
supporting operational intelligence paired with its shared unified SDX experience across analytical
and operational applications.

Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Labs is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It offers CockroachDB, a distributed
transactional DBMS compatible with PostgreSQL, which can be deployed in public and private clouds

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and on-premises. Its dbPaaS deployment option is available on the three most popular cloud
platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, while its self-hosted
offering can be run on-premises, in hybrid, object-oriented multicloud, and in intercloud deployments.
Established in 2015, Cockroach Labs now has a client base across multiple industries spanning
finance, high tech, retail and gaming. Its business is mainly in North America and Europe, but it also
has a presence in Asia/Pacific and Latin America.

Strengths
Distributed transactions for mission-critical systems: CockroachDB is well-suited for
organizations’ core systems, which have extremely high requirements for availability, scale, data
consistency, data residency and security. The perception that distributed transactional DBMS are
not suitable for organizations’ most mission-critical applications has changed, and CockroachDB
is well-positioned to take advantage of this trend.

Full multicloud, hybrid cloud and intercloud operations: Cockroach Labs is continuously evolving
its capabilities for hybrid environments, such as intercloud resource efficiency and intercloud data
security. These efforts are enhancing its position as a cloud-agnostic transactional database in
complex infrastructure environments.

Easier to operate: Cockroach Labs has enhanced its out-of-box features to more easily realize
expected resilience, performance, correctness and elasticity benefits. The majority of feedback
from Gartner clients regarding its configuration complexity has been positive this year.

Cautions
Competition from other vendors: Elasticity and high availability are not unique benefits of
distributed transactional DBMSs today. New cloud DBMS products offered by CSPs, independent
DBMS vendors and traditional vendors are also innovating in these areas. Cockroach Labs needs
to respond to this aggressive competition to remain competitive in this market.

Lack of vertical ecosystem: Vertical industry solutions built on CockroachDB are rare, despite
efforts from the vendor to establish vertical industry partnerships. As a result, most successful
deployments require custom-made approaches to solve industry challenges.

Dedicated operational DBMS use cases: Cockroach Labs continues to prioritize its innovation in
online transaction processing (OLTP) use cases for relational data. A concentrated business
strategy is good for a specialized technology vendor, but it also means additional integration
efforts are needed for clients looking for a more comprehensive use of different data models or
query patterns.

Couchbase

Couchbase is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Couchbase offers the Capella cloud DBMS
service as well as a self-managed version of both Couchbase Server and Couchbase Mobile, an
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embedded version of Couchbase for iOS, Android devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Couchbase’s operations are primarily based in North America, but it has a substantial presence in
Europe and growth in the Asia/Pacific region. It is broadly represented across major market sectors,
but is particularly strong in large-scale consumer-facing and back-end enterprise applications.
Couchbase Capella provides SQL++, its query language for leveraging developers’ familiarity with SQL
while being able to work with JSON document-modeled data. Couchbase provides multidocument
ACID consistency compliance.

Strengths
Mobile capabilities: Couchbase has positioned itself as a leading player in the mobile and edge
space, allowing for synchronization with edge data stores even if they are periodically not
connected to a central service. This capability is available from server to server as well as between
mobile devices running Android or iOS and servers. Couchbase is unique in its peer-to-peer sync
offerings for this space.

Strong capabilities for user engagement: Couchbase Capella offers rich capabilities not typically
offered in a single product that address large-scale customer interactions. The union of a strong
cache, SQL++ query language, document, key value and search models in a single product,
deployable at scale in the cloud and on mobile devices, is powerful and leveraged effectively by
many enterprises. Couchbase remains one of the most popular database systems globally.

Distributed intercloud approach across multiple clouds: Capella offers sophisticated replication
and high availability configurations that span multiple clouds, which make it a good choice for
systems that need a high level of scalability and availability.

Cautions
Market awareness: Couchbase’s market awareness has improved, but there is opportunity to do
better. Its new focus has yet to generate significant market awareness or capture the growth in
usage captured by some of its other open-source peers, as indicated by the number of incoming
inquiries to Gartner about the product.

Lack of ecosystem support: Couchbase does not have a full-fledged capability to access data nor
provide data to engines outside of the Couchbase world, although they are on its roadmap. The
ability to broadly interact with multiple engines across an ecosystem is driving increasing flexibility
and efficiency in multiple use cases, most prominently analytics and AI. Other nonrelational
products also have this limitation.

Competition from other multimodel databases: A selection of other databases now offer
significant multimodel support including JSON document model support and in-memory, real-time
features. This has increased the competition in this area.

Databricks

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Databricks is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers Databricks Lakehouse Platform on Alibaba
Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and as a first-party product with Microsoft as
Azure Databricks. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform includes Unity Catalog and Delta Live Tables.
Unity Catalog is a metadata catalog and governance hub for data in Databricks and outside
repositories, and Delta Live Tables simplifies ingest and extraction, transformation and loading (ETL)
with declarative pipeline development for streaming and batch data as well as support for end-to-end
AI workloads. The Lakehouse Platform consists of data stored in a data lake in open-source Delta
Lake table format, which adds metadata and structures to the underlying data to deliver the
capabilities of a traditional data warehouse. Databricks SQL provides a serverless data warehouse
for data analysts to run SQL and business intelligence (BI) applications at scale directly on the data
lake. Databricks focuses on analytical use cases, in multiple industries, operating worldwide.

Strengths
Data science and AI: Databricks has strong roots in data science. Its vision for the future includes
the ability to use Databricks-developed large language models (LLM) to train on a customer’s own
data and use the results of this training to customize other models as well as allow nontechnical
users to query the Lakehouse Platform with natural language.

Unity Catalog: Databricks embraces data ecosystem support via its Unity Catalog, which provides
fine-grained access control and metadata management and lineage for Databricks tables, files,
notebooks, machine learning models and data in federated databases. Unity Catalog can access
any data source that uses standard storage objects, like Parquet and Delta Lake, as well as other
data sources such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Snowflake.

Scalability: With its platform built on a highly scalable data lake foundation, Databricks has
provided its customers with an extreme level of scalability for appropriate tasks. Databricks
customers have systems that can process petabytes of data a day or as little as a few gigabytes.

Cautions
Less mature relational capabilities: The relational capabilities of the Databricks Lakehouse are still
relatively new and not as well-established as other leaders in this area for traditional relational
workloads.

Product breadth can complicate focus: Because Databricks provides such a broad set of
capabilities in a single, unified platform, users may find it challenging to understand its full range of
capabilities or to find the right components to use for a particular use case.

Pricing models: As Databricks increases its pricing flexibility with additional options, such as a
serverless option to go along with its standard consumption-based model, discovering and using
the most optimal model for a particular set of use cases can be challenging. The serverless option
is available for SQL warehouses, data science, machine learning and AI model serving, but not for
other operations.
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EDB

EDB is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. EDB is a privately held company based in Bedford,
Massachusetts. It offers EDB BigAnimal, a fully managed PostgreSQL implementation in the cloud.
BigAnimal runs on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. EDB
BigAnimal can also run in distributed mode as EDB Postgres Distributed (PGD), and also provides its
database software and tooling on-premises. EDB BigAnimal is suited to both operational transaction
and analytics applications, and mixes of the two. EDB support operations assist customers with
mission-critical systems on a worldwide basis. EDB is a major supporter of the open-source
movement and provides a large proportion of the contributions to the PostgreSQL codebase.
Established in 2004, EDB serves a wide range of industries worldwide, with a main presence in North
America and Europe and a presence in Asia/Pacific.

Strengths
Leading vendor for PostgreSQL: EDB is a go-to vendor for PostgreSQL solutions, and interest in
PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL-compatible databases is growing. While characterized as a niche
vendor within the Magic Quadrant, this is relative to the overall size of the cloud DBMS market,
which is very broad and deep in its features and its overall value. EDB specializes in providing fully
supported and managed cloud solutions for the PostgreSQL databases, enabling many
deployment choices and migration paths.

Support and community: EDB is well-regarded for the support that it provides. In addition, it is
valued for the contributions it makes to PostgreSQL and the way that it balances open-source
community involvement and the provision of products and services.

Ease of migration: EDB has successfully put in a great deal of effort to extend PostgreSQL with
optional compatibility features for other DBMS, most notably Oracle. This makes migration to EDB
easier by reducing the amount of code conversion needed to support a migration.

Cautions
PostgreSQL-compatible competitors: Many customers are adopting PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL-
compatible DBMSs, which opens up many more migration paths. Other vendors also offer
PostgreSQL-compatible DBMS, which provides competition in this space for customers who want
the migration options but not necessarily PostgreSQL itself.

Late to cloud: EDB was relatively late in providing a cloud-based offering and thus has had a
shorter amount of time to grow this side of the business and establish its presence.

Suited to organizations with an open-source strategy: EDB is best suited to organizations that
have and are comfortable with an open-source software strategy.

Google
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Google is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It operates globally, with the exception of China, across
many industries. Google Cloud provides an extended outreach to on-premises and other cloud
service providers and offers managed container services to support applications portability. Google
Cloud supports over a dozen database engines for different storage and processing needs such as
AlloyDB, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server), Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery,
Dataproc, BigLake, Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. Dataplex is a metadata/governance
layer and an integrated data ecosystem providing unified metadata, security and governance across
the enterprise.

Strengths
Openness: Google has redefined the lakehouse by breaking down the data silos with BigLake,
unifying data warehouses, data lakes and multicloud data across other cloud service providers
with integrated access within Google Cloud. This is enhanced by a strategy of open support for
PostgreSQL across relational databases such as AlloyDB and a common storage layer that
supports unified transactional and analytical workloads.

Unified data management and governance: Google Cloud unifies data management and
governance use cases with its Dataplex offering. Dataplex’s unified and centralized metadata
storage management allows the governed access of metadata and data for multiple data
management workloads across Google’s proprietary and open-source tools.

Industry-leading cloud infrastructure: Google has established a reputation through its AI research
and innovation, partnerships, contribution to open-source data technologies and differentiation in
its cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud offers an industry-leading 99.999% uptime SLA for products
including Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable and Firestore.

Cautions
Market perception: While Google Cloud continues to expand its capabilities through native
services and through partner integrations, some still do not view GCP as a choice for complex
enterprise-scale applications. This is no longer the case, and evaluators should ensure that they
correctly assess Google Cloud against their actual requirements.

Focused range of services: Google Cloud has a narrower range of services than other CSPs and
partners with third parties to provide integrated capabilities for specialized needs, such as Graph
DBMS. GCP has a concise set of clearly defined products with little overlap compared to other
vendors. For evaluators, this can be a benefit and should be judged on its merits.

Simplicity of pricing: Google Cloud offers a simple pricing and deployment scheme with serverless
and consumption models. It also offers capacity-based pricing for those who prefer predictable
costs. Google’s focus on simplicity should not be seen as a lack in capability, but is often preferred.

IBM

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IBM is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It offers Cloud Pak for Data, a unified integration layer for
containerized DBMS including IBM Db2 on Cloud, IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud, IBM Cloud Data
Engine, IBM Cloudant, IBM Netezza, the IBM Cloud Database family and IBM Event Streams. It also
offers managed services for third-party offerings. IBM has unified its data management for AI under
Watsonx.ai, Watsonx.data and Watsonx.governance to provide integration, lakehouse and modern AI
capabilities in a complementary and integrated manner. The IBM Cloud Database family provides a
wide variety of other managed data technologies, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch,
Redis, RabbitMQ, SingleStore, DataStax and EnterpriseDB. IBM operates globally, and in all industries
and organization sizes. It addresses both operational and analytical use cases.

Strengths
Technical depth and expertise: IBM remains one of the most technically accomplished vendors in
the world and is able to bring to bear significant lab research on fundamental research for
innovation.

Industry knowledge: IBM operates in a wide variety of industries and in many cases can provide
specialist offerings to assist in building business solutions using IBM technology. The business
data models from IBM remain among the best and most comprehensive in the industry and can be
used by multiple database technologies.

Portability: IBM Cloud Pak for Data is an innovative offering that provides a complete and portable
platform that can be run in public and private clouds, on-premises and in virtualized environments.

Cautions
Market awareness: IBM maintains a considerable presence in the overall DBMS market.
Nevertheless, newer entrants, including large cloud-native service providers, are growing their
cloud DBMS presence more rapidly and at above-market rates. While IBM strives to keep pace with
the expansion, there is still room to improve and adjust to the growing market demands of the
DBMS in the cloud.

Product choice and selection: IBM offers a wide variety of cloud DBMS systems — both its own
and from third parties — and the diversity of database engines allows customers more choices.
IBM must do more to help its customers understand how multiple database offerings can work to
solve varying customer needs with the best fit and right product selection.

Regaining momentum: IBM data strategy is now moving much more clearly into alignment with
the direction of the cloud DBMS market. However, it needs to do more to set the pace in regaining
the mind share and momentum it deserves by expanding its market influence and direction in data
management technology deployments.

InterSystems

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InterSystems is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. It offers InterSystems IRIS, a multimodel hybrid
DBMS and a variety of solution-focused cloud services built on IRIS. InterSystems has a global
presence in healthcare and is active in supply chain, finance, manufacturing and other industries.
InterSystems IRIS is available as a public, fully managed dbPaaS cloud service on Amazon Web
Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Tencent. A private, fully managed dbPaaS
version is also available. InterSystems provides support for both operational and analytical use cases
and operates worldwide, with predominance in North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.

Strengths
Solutions: InterSystems is offering a fairly unique, modular approach to solutions. It offers
frameworks and data models for healthcare, supply chain and financial asset management that all
run on IRIS. Additionally, it offers cloud services such as supply-chain forecasting, health record
exchange and others that work over those same frameworks. The combination allows for
significant flexibility versus packaged applications while leveraging the value of prebuilt solutions.

Continuing and enhanced strength in healthcare: Gartner’s client inquiries continue to show
customer reliance on the support and functionality InterSystems offers for key healthcare
concerns, including graph-based support for the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)
standard API for sharing healthcare data. This includes providing these capabilities to other DBMS
vendors. InterSystems has a growing recognition in financial services and supply chain.

Simpler development: InterSystems customers are leveraging embedded Python and SQL at an
increasing rate, allowing development with less IRIS-specific skills and syntax. This flexibility has
also been supported by significant increases in performance for IRIS.

Cautions
Limited availability of skills: Customers may struggle to find personnel skilled with InterSystems
IRIS and other InterSystems products. This continues to be a challenge that potential customers
must consider. While Python and SQL support provides familiar access for many developers, the
architecture of IRIS is unique and very different from alternatives.

Analytics considerations: While InterSystems has made improvements in analytics, including data
lakehouse capabilities, Gartner clients still report a need to bring data outside of InterSystems for
some analytic use cases. InterSystems has partnered with others for data lake and lakehouse
capabilities, such as AWS HealthLake.

Learning curve, documentation and complexity: Reviewers on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform
report some issues around quality of documentation and initial support. Coupled with a relatively
steep learning curve on a complex offering, customers report more effort is required to implement
successfully. Once implemented, customers generally report a very high level of satisfaction.

Microsoft

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Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It provides a broad range of cloud DBMS offerings
including Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Database for
MariaDB, Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, and Azure Cosmos
DB. It also provides integrated D&A solutions with built-in DBMS such as Azure Synapse Analytics
and Microsoft Fabric (in preview as of the evaluation date). Headquartered in Redmond, Washington,
Microsoft is a leading cloud service provider with geographically diversified business operations
throughout the world. Its customers are spread across a wide range of industries and deployment
sizes.

Strengths
A trustworthy global partner: Microsoft’s broad global presence with highly localized business
operations all over the world makes it one of the limited trustworthy global DBMS partners in
today’s world with digital geopolitics in play. Its broad partnership with ISVs/service providers has
also enhanced its leadership in the DBMS market for traditional industries like financial services,
healthcare and manufacturing.

A more open and unified data ecosystem: Microsoft continues to enhance the compatibility and
interoperability between its DBMSs and other Microsoft products such as Microsoft 365, Power BI
and Purview. This enables a more consistent experience for its clients. At the same time, the “one
lake” direction in Microsoft Fabric brings more openness to data in non-Microsoft systems, which
has the potential to reduce its clients’ vendor lock-in concerns.

Innovation in AI-augmented data management: Microsoft is one of the pioneers innovating AI-
augmented data management capabilities in its DBMS and D&A solutions. Microsoft Fabric (in
preview) will use generative-AI-based automation and other copilot-style technology to automate
data management tasks from simple DBMS administration to complex data integration.

Cautions
Pace of brand upgrading: In the past few years, Microsoft has announced many new data and
analytics offerings, such as Azure Synapse Analytics (December 2020), Microsoft Intelligent Data
Platform (May 2022), and Microsoft Fabric (May 2023), which include overlapping DBMS products.
This frequent rebranding and evolution has resulted in concerns around roadmap and delivery for
customers who have or are building on existing versions of Microsoft D&A solutions.

Performance and cost challenges: In feedback from Gartner clients, performance and cost
challenges continue to be the most frequently voiced concerns. Less predictable cost and
performance for scaled data consumption spanning its DBMS and data management products still
have room to improve compared to its peers.

Deployment challenges: Feedback from Gartner inquiries and Peer Insights highlights the
complexity of configuration and tool utilization to fully realize its claimed integrated ecosystem

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capabilities. Some clients who lack deep configuration knowledge are demanding more enhanced
performance, security and cost control from its out-of-box solutions.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. It offers the document-based nonrelational MongoDB
Atlas on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure; the on-premises
MongoDB Enterprise Server; and Community Edition, which is source-available and free to use. It also
offers MongoDB Atlas Charts, Atlas Data Federation, Atlas Search, Atlas Online Archive, Atlas App
Services and Atlas Device Sync and Device SDKs (formerly Realm), a mobile object database for
remote and edge use. Application-driven analytics and time series collections are also supported.
Vector search and stream processing are in preview as of October 2023 with the former scheduled to
be generally available in December 2023. Its operations are global. MongoDB is in wide use across all
industry segments and in enterprises of all sizes.

Strengths
Market presence and momentum: MongoDB continues to occupy a significant presence in the
marketplace and grow at above-market rates. It has established itself as a standard for
nonrelational databases in the application development stack. MongoDB has a strong following,
and this engenders good availability of skills.

Hybrid, multicloud and intercloud deployment choice: MongoDB can be run on a wide variety of
cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, Alibaba, and several geosovereign and industry-
focused clouds, as well as on-premises in private clouds and using containerized and virtualized
environments. This provides a lot of flexibility in placing development and production instances
and the connections between them.

Expanded product vision: MongoDB has expanded its data platform with new capabilities such as
queryable encryption and support for time-series workloads. The MongoDB Atlas SQL Interface,
Connectors and Drivers enable query, analysis and visualization of Atlas data in SQL-based BI
tools, thus spanning the relational and nonrelational worlds. Roadmap items include vector search,
stream processing and additional edge capabilities.

Cautions
The document model is different: MongoDB adopts the nonrelational JSON document approach to
data storage and representation; it eliminates the impedance mismatch between the database and
programming languages. This can seem strange to developers used to the relational model.
However, MongoDB provides tools and assists with training and intellectual capital dealing with a
relational approach to document model mapping and migration of associated application code.

Increased competition: MongoDB has become a de facto standard for document database-
oriented application development. That has caused other vendors in the market to offer MongoDB-
compatible interfaces to their products with a view to allowing customers to be able to port
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MongoDB-based applications to their competitive products. This has increased competition, but
evaluators should examine just how compatible and complete these interfaces are.
The rise of multimodel DBMS: It is becoming more common for DBMS to support multiple models,
not just relational and not just document. MongoDB itself now offers SQL for analytics. As most
major DBMS products now support document models, MongoDB will need to rely on articulating
its particular advantages in implementation and approach rather than the advantages of the
document model itself.

Neo4j

Neo4j is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. The AuraDB managed service, available on GCP, AWS and
Azure, became generally available in September 2019. The company also offers the Neo4j graph
database on-premises and for private clouds, and the AuraDS “data science as a service” offering for
integrated AI/ML. Its support for ACID transactions makes it suitable beyond the typical data science
use cases associated with graph databases. Neo4j has customers worldwide across several vertical
markets including financial services, transportation and warehousing, and professional, technical and
scientific services.

Strengths
Graph market leadership: Neo4j has a broad community of users and loyal customers. Its Cypher
and openCypher property graph query language is used by a dozen other vendors in their own
graph offerings. While the graph DBMS market is still relatively small, Neo4j’s broad presence
spanning the open-source community, enterprise users, third-party developers and cloud service
providers is unmatched by other independent vendors in the graph DBMS market.

Graph data science productivity: Neo4j provides a robust set of algorithms for analytics and data
science over graph data, providing significant productivity and performance gains versus
alternative approaches for analyzing graph data. It has robust connectors supporting integration
with Spark as well as common ML platforms including Amazon SageMaker, Databricks and Google
Cloud Vertex AI.

Strong customer satisfaction: Peer Insights reviewers of the on-premises offering consistently
praise Neo4j for its integration and deployment services, and for its service and support. The
graphical representation and speed to develop were cited as useful features.

Cautions
Business model concerns: Gartner clients express dissatisfaction with AuraDB’s pricing. AuraDB’s
self-service, pay-as-you-go options are restricted to a version with limited capabilities. Their more
capable enterprise version is only available through traditional enterprise channels or as a one-year
reservation through cloud marketplaces. AuraDS is only available for self-service in a single cloud,
GCP. While AuraDB Enterprise is available in AWS, Azure and GCP, it is sold only through traditional
enterprise channels. Further, Alibaba’s hosted Neo4j offering is a different product than AuraDB.

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Customers need to be aware of the varying offerings and pricing approaches as they consider
AuraDB.
Growing competitive landscape: Numerous graph DBMS competitors have entered the market,
and increased graph analytics functionality is available within Spark. While Neo4j has partnered
with all major CSPs, Google Cloud has chosen Neo4j as its main graph offering. Customers still
prefer the native graph DBMS products when offered by a CSP before looking at independent
software vendors. In addition, there are several open-source graph DBMS and analytics products
gaining substantial user bases.

Lack of turnkey solution focus: While Neo4j has shown substantial success across some key use
cases, such as fraud detection and recommendation engines, there is still significant work left for
the customer to apply their technology and realize the potential benefits. Also, graph databases
tend not to expand outside of the use cases for which they are especially suited.

Oracle

Oracle is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Oracle Autonomous Database includes Autonomous
Transaction Processing, Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous JSON Database and APEX
Application Development services. Oracle Exadata Database services are available in Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure (OCI), and on the Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer (ExaCC) and OCI Dedicated Region
private clouds. Oracle also offers Oracle MySQL HeatWave, Oracle NoSQL Database services, OCI
Cache for Redis managed service and OCI PostgreSQL Service (currently in limited availability).
Oracle is active in all areas of the world, and its database offerings address a wide variety of vertical
industries and use cases.

Strengths
Proven feature breadth and depth: The Oracle DBMS has one of the richest sets of technologies in
the market, an advantage that continues in its cloud offering. Oracle’s rich feature set has been
proven over decades of production operation, including most of the world’s largest OLTP,
operational intelligence, data warehouse and JSON systems.

Pricing model: The Oracle Autonomous Database allows customers to get the price and
predictability of a resource-based model with the automatic scalability of a consumption-based
model, delivering excellent price and performance. On top of this flexible blended pricing model,
Oracle offers a credit for on-premises support costs in relation to a customer’s spend on the Oracle
Database Cloud offerings, and there are no initial charges for data egress.

Hybrid and multicloud capabilities: Oracle has a number of database offerings that run in a
customer’s data center or any public cloud data center. These range from a standard client-
managed model to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, which implements a fully managed solution
within a customer data center, to its strong partnership with Microsoft Azure. Additionally, MySQL
HeatWave runs in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

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Cautions
Legacy perception of cost: Oracle continues to refine and modernize its pricing model for cloud
and provides competitive pricing. However, Gartner clients and reviews on Gartner’s Peer Insights
platform regularly cite cost and expense as a primary negative factor. Oracle needs to improve
marketing communications and account management to counter this legacy perception.

Not top of mind for cloud: Oracle was later to move to the cloud than other providers. The three
largest cloud service providers by DBMS revenue and more recent entrants as well as others have
captured much of the mind share in this market. This hurts Oracle since it results in its absence on
default vendor shortlists. The recent Oracle Database@Azure announcement should help for those
cases where Azure is the strategic CSP for a client.

Slower growth than some hyperscaler competitors: Oracle’s growth has been respectable, slightly
above overall cloud market growth, but some high-profile competitors have been growing faster.
Oracle’s ability to transition a very large on-premises customer base has the potential to accelerate
the future growth of OCI.

Redis

Redis is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Redis Cloud, a fully managed cloud dbaaS offering based
on the popular open-source database Redis, is available on AWS, GCP, Azure, and can be deployed
alongside on-premises, hybrid and multicloud environments. It is a multimodel DBMS that is
specialized in real-time transactional use cases. Redis’ operations are primarily in North America, but
it also has a substantial footprint in EMEA and the Asia/Pacific region, with a broad range of industry
adoptions. Its open-source product is one of the most popular open-source databases and is widely
used all over the world.

Strengths
Popularity: Redis is one of the most widely deployed databases worldwide. Offered by all cloud
providers, it’s used by millions of programmers, and is a key part of many large and small
applications. This popularity is served by Redis, Inc. to drive enterprise extensions, modern data
type and processing engine capabilities on top of open-source Redis, and enrich them with various
frameworks, integrations and tools.

Real-time capability: Redis is well-known for its in-memory data processing capability, which is
widely used to sustain modern real-time use cases in most industries. Amplified by its ease-of-use
cloud offering and AI capabilities, Redis Cloud is a significant tool for building responsive
applications. This strength is furthered by widespread support within application frameworks,
enabling integration of Redis Cloud on top of other databases.

Popularity in AI/ML use cases: Redis Cloud has become popular for usage in AI/ML, driven by real-
time capabilities for storing values as well as its early availability of vector search capabilities as
compared to many other products.
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Cautions
Unchanged market recognition: Despite the innovations to cover broader workloads, the popularity
of Redis is based on requirements for cache, real-time and in-memory. While Redis has expanded
the functionality of Redis Enterprise beyond these core capabilities, this broader footprint has not
been recognized by the market.

Limited vertical engagement: The vertical partnership for the enterprise use of Redis is still limited
in the market. Despite the popularity of its open-source version, many clients are lacking vertical
service providers or ISVs to help them build industrial applications.

Significant competition: Despite its popularity and high-standard SLA, many customers turn to
other providers when deploying Redis in the cloud. These other vendors, most prominently the
major CSPs, are developing increased efficiency and functionality on Redis or their own API-
compatible products in customers’ implementations.

SAP

SAP is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Its products include SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere,
SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise, SAP IQ and SAP SQL Anywhere. Products address both operational
and analytical DBMS use cases. SAP HANA Cloud is a managed database service that supports both
transactional and analytical workloads in one solution including multimodel support. For business
data fabric use cases, SAP offers SAP Datasphere for the unification of both SAP and non-SAP data,
which also incorporates non-SAP partner ecosystem software. It also offers SAP BW/4HANA, a
packaged data warehouse application that can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud. SAP
operates on a global basis from diverse locations. It has enterprise customers of all sizes from all
industries. SAP is best suited for organizations with a mature SAP-focused ERP strategy.

Strengths
Multicloud, intercloud and hybrid: SAP HANA-based database systems are available for
deployment on a wide variety of cloud service providers including AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba as
both a managed database service via SAP HANA Cloud and bring-your-own software model. They
can also be deployed on-premises and in containerized or virtualized environments. The ability to
work across clouds is valued by organizations with global supply chains.

Market presence: SAP has greatly increased its presence in the data management market through
the adoption of SAP HANA Cloud as the underlying engine for SAP business applications. SAP has
a very large customer base for its applications, and it is natural for SAP customers to adopt SAP
HANA Cloud to run those applications.

SAP data ecosystem: The SAP Datasphere strategy is built upon and powered by SAP HANA
Cloud. Thus, SAP is now much more open in its ability to import and export data between SAP and
non-SAP environments via file exchange, replication and federation. SAP Datasphere is most
applicable to organizations with a significant SAP technology presence.

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Cautions
Limited adoption outside of SAP ecosystem: SAP has been less successful in penetrating the
general market because organizations that do not already use SAP are unlikely to adopt SAP for
data management. However, this does not detract from the value of SAP data management for
those organizations that are or are not SAP customers.

Marketing and sales messaging: SAP clients continue to tell Gartner that they are not being fully
informed about SAP’s data management offerings. Customers of SAP applications should ensure
that they properly assess the SAP data management offerings, as some variants allow simpler
solutions, especially for data integration.

Unfamiliarity with SAP HANA: SAP HANA has been in the market for over a decade, and it is a
general-purpose ANSI SQL database. However, there are still several concepts that may be
unfamiliar to developers — in particular, the use of the native multimodel engines, multitier data
storage and processing architecture, and augmented transactional capabilities. Developers that
are not familiar with these capabilities may not be taking full advantage of the platform. Adopters
should familiarize themselves with these and other concepts with SAP HANA Cloud, which
provides a simplified cloud-native environment to leverage these capabilities.

Snowflake

Snowflake is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. The Snowflake Data Cloud addresses analytics, data
warehousing and data lake requirements. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients
are of all sizes. Snowflake is active globally, predominantly in North America and Europe. It is active
in multiple industries including finance, healthcare, retail, telecommunications and manufacturing.
Snowflake offers data warehouse, data lake and AI/ML processing within the Snowflake Data Cloud
together with data sharing capabilities that allow the sharing of data within and between clouds.
Snowflake also has expanded its vision and strategy to include transactional working, native low-
code application development and sharing, plus GenAI.

Strengths
Ease of use: Snowflake continues to lead in the ease with which its analytical systems can be
implemented and operated. Ease of use is now a major theme in this marketplace, due largely to
the initiative that Snowflake took when it entered the market. Snowflake will continue to benefit
from this trend as one of its main exponents.

Growing market mind share: Interest in Snowflake continues to grow at a rapid pace, with revenue
growth significantly outpacing the general growth in the market. Gartner receives many inquiries
from clients that are considering adopting Snowflake.

Integrated solution with robust ecosystem: Snowflake promotes the philosophy of an easy-to-use
integrated solution complemented by a robust data-sharing and data marketplace story. The
Kubernetes and co-processor approach enhances this.

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Cautions
Predicting spend: While improvements have been made to the Snowflake DBMS, Gartner still gets
reports that it can be challenging to predict spend. However, some clients are doing this
successfully. There is now a market for financial operations (FinOps) vendors emerging to address
this for Snowflake and other cloud vendors. Snowflake has partners in this space and is enhancing
its product for improved support.

Progression of new features to production: Snowflake regularly introduces many new features.
While this is a good thing, the pace of the features through private preview, public preview and into
production can appear slow. Evaluators should be clear on when functionality will be ready to use
in production.

Lack of an on-premises offering: A section of the market still requires some kind of on-premises
presence to assist in the transition to cloud, and cannot move to cloud without it. This type of
organization operates in a regulatory regime that requires on-premises for at least some of its
processing.

Teradata

Teradata is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Teradata is focused on analytics, data warehousing,
lakehouses and data lake requirements. Its operations are worldwide, and its clients tend to be of all
sizes but are often very large organizations with very demanding analytical workloads. Also provided
are vertical industry offerings such as the Teradata Industry Data Models (iDMs) including data
models for finance, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing and healthcare. Teradata clients
operate in a wide variety of business sectors including retail, manufacturing, telecommunications,
healthcare and financial services. Teradata also provides distributed capability via its Teradata
QueryGrid feature. Teradata is active in many countries around the world and operates on a global
basis.

Strengths
Optimized ecosystem: Teradata’s QueryGrid implements access to data outside of Teradata
efficiently by intelligently pushing down processing where appropriate, offloading cycles from the
Teradata machine and reducing the amount of data that has to be returned to Teradata. Teradata is
now extending this for optimal placement of workloads inside and outside of Teradata using its
global planner. This capability provides Teradata with the ability to challenge the leaders who are
shaping the market.

Depth and breadth of analytic capabilities: Teradata has long been the leader in providing the
most advanced analytic capabilities to its customer base, including integrated AI/ML, robust mixed
workload management and distributed access. Its customers have tended to be very sophisticated
in their use of analytics, setting up a synergistic virtuous circle of product enhancement and
deployment.

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Workload management: Based on its architectural history, Teradata has the best workload
management for analytic workloads in the market. This strength allows it to handle very
demanding workloads with efficient use of resources as well as control costs in the cloud.

Cautions
Lack of buyer awareness: Gartner inquiries show that Teradata is rarely at the top of a shortlist for
cloud vendors, and the number of Gartner inquiries concerning this vendor has declined.

Lateness to the cloud: Teradata was relatively late in offering a full cloud version of its product.
This meant that if its customers wanted to move to the cloud early in the cycle, they looked
elsewhere. This continues to have an effect on Teradata’s market awareness. Buyers need to
ensure they are evaluating Teradata’s most recent cloud-native offering to get a full understanding
of its capabilities.

Product sophistication requires educated buyers: The strengths listed above are significant. But
those strengths are not necessarily apparent in simplistic comparisons, so buyers need to take the
time to understand the differentiation and the demands of enterprise workloads.

Yugabyte

Yugabyte is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Sunnyvale,
California, it offers YugabyteDB, a PostgreSQL open-source SQL database that runs in the public
cloud and can also run on-premises. YugabyteDB runs on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud
Platform and Microsoft Azure, and can be used in both a multicloud and intercloud mode with nodes
in multiple clouds and on-premises all connected to provide a single distributed database instance.
Operations are worldwide, predominantly in North America, Canada and Europe. Yugabyte also has a
presence in Asia/Pacific, Japan and Latin America, and some presence in the Middle East. Yugabyte
appeals to a wide range of customer types but predominantly arts, entertainment and recreation,
finance and insurance, information providers, and retail. Such organizations need highly available and
high-throughput transaction systems.

Strengths
PostgreSQL compatibility: YugabyteDB is runtime compatible with PostgreSQL, including stored
procedures, user-defined functions and triggers, which makes it compatible with many PostgreSQL
tools. PostgreSQL compatibility is itself a trend in the cloud DBMS market.

Distributed database functionality: Distributed database management systems (DDBMS) are now
accepted for mainstream applications. Not so long ago, DDBMS were seen as specialist and
esoteric, but now they are considered proven and suitable for large mission-critical applications.
YugabyteDB is well-established in this market.

Hybrid, multicloud and intercloud: Inherent in the distributed model is the ability to spread a single
application database over multiple clouds and on-premises. This provides an opportunity to move

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workloads between these different locations, which can be advantageous for optimizing resources
and for having procurement choice.

Cautions
Size: Yugabyte is still a relatively small company in the cloud DBMS market, and buyers should
check that they are happy with its support and roadmap.

Competition for large, high-concurrency workloads: The DDBMS approach is undoubtedly very
effective for very large transactional workloads. However, improvements in nondistributed
transactional systems, particularly from the hyperscalers, means that these competitors can cover
many of these large opportunities too.

Ensure configuration for distributed systems: While YugabyteDB implements a proven distributed
solution, it is still necessary for system designers to properly understand the principles of
distributed systems, especially in the areas of performance, data sovereignty, high availability and
recovery. This is not a concern, simply an area to attend to when using these types of systems.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have
changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore,
changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
The following vendors were added this year because they met this Magic Quadrant’s inclusion
criteria, including the customer interest index:

EDB

Yugabyte

Dropped
While they met this Magic Quadrant’s other inclusion criteria, the following vendors were not among
the top 20 organizations in a Customer Interest Index defined by Gartner for this Magic Quadrant:

Progress (MarkLogic)

Tencent Cloud

TigerGraph

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Data inputs used to calculate customer interest include the following measures, among others:

Gartner customer search and inquiry volume and trend data

Volume of job listings on a range of employment websites in the U.S., Europe and China

Frequency of mentions as a competitor to other cloud DBMS vendors in reviews on Gartner’s Peer
Insights forum during the year ending March 2023

Noninclusion due to the Customer Interest Index should not be seen to reflect negatively on these
vendors. Gartner methodology restricts the Magic Quadrant to 20 vendors.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
Gartner Magic Quadrants identify and analyze the most relevant providers in a market. Gartner
imposes an upper limit of 20 vendors to aid in identification of the most relevant providers. The
following inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes that Gartner analysts consider necessary
for a vendor to be included in this Magic Quadrant.

Inclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, a vendor had to:

Offer a generally available software product that met Gartner’s definition of a cloud DBMS. Gartner
defines the market for cloud database management systems as software products that store and
manipulate data and are delivered as software as a service in the cloud as their primary delivery
mechanism. They may optionally be capable of running on-premises or in hybrid, multicloud or
intercloud configurations. They can be used for transaction work, for analytical work or for both.
The cloud DBMS may also have features that allow it to participate in a wider data ecosystem.
Capabilities that are supported include the following.

The must-have capabilities for this market include:

Must be offered as software as a service on provider-managed public or private cloud

systems.

They manage their data on cloud storage. That is, they are not hosted in infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), such as in a virtual machine or container managed by the customer.

The standard capabilities for this market include:

Cloud DBMS products persist data within storage controlled by them rather than handle data
in flight.

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They are databases that stand in their own right as data management components that store,
read, update and manage data. This contrasts with systems embedded within other software
such as BI tools.

The cloud DBMS should support transactional or analytical database operations, or both.
The optional capabilities for this market include:

Vendors may cater to multiple data models and data types — relational, nonrelational
(document, key value, wide column, graph), geospatial, time series and others.
The cloud DBMS must also support more than one of the following cloud DBMS use cases:

OLTP transactions

Lightweight transactions

Operational intelligence

Traditional data warehouse

Logical data warehouse

Data lake

Rank among the top 20 organizations in a Customer Interest Indicator (CII) defined by Gartner for
this Magic Quadrant. Noninclusion due to the CII should not reflect negatively on vendors. Gartner
methodology limits the number of vendors who can appear in the Magic Quadrant to 20. Data
inputs used in the CII include the following measures, among others:

Gartner customer search and inquiry volume and trend data.

Volume of job listings on a range of employment websites in the U.S., Europe and China.

Frequency of mentions as a competitor to other cloud DBMS vendors in reviews on Gartner’s

Peer Insights forum during the year ending March 2023.

Have market presence in at least three of the following regions (regional market presence is
defined as the existence of dedicated sales offices or distribution partnerships in a specific region)
and a minimum of 5% of the cloud revenue from each region:

North America (Canada, Mexico and the U.S.)

Central and South America

Europe (including Western Europe and Eastern Europe)

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Middle East and Africa (including North Africa)

Asia/Pacific

Japan
Have a cloud DBMS service generally available as of midnight, U.S. Eastern Daylight Time on 1 July
2023. This includes any new functionality added to the service(s) by the specified date. We do not
consider beta, “early access,” “technology preview,” or other not generally available functionality or
services. Additionally:

Any acquired product or service must have been acquired and offered by the acquiring vendor
as of 1 July 2023. Acquisitions after this date were considered under their preacquisition
identities, if appropriate, and are represented separately until the publication of the following
year’s Magic Quadrant.

Exclusion Criteria

Vendors marketing only products from the list below are explicitly excluded from this Magic Quadrant
and Critical Capabilities research.

They include:

Streaming services, whose use cases are dominated by immediate event processing, and which
are rarely if ever used for subsequent management of the data involved

Prerelational DBMS products

Object-oriented DBMS products

Data grid products

BI and analytical solutions that offer a cloud DBMS that is limited specifically to the vendor’s own
BI and analytical tools

Analytics query accelerators (SQL interfaces to object stores or file systems)

Vendors of data virtualization, data fabric and data federation that do not provide data persistence
of their own

Additionally, this market does not include vendors that only provide DBMSs hosted in infrastructure
as a service, such as in a virtual machine or container managed by the customer.

Honorable Mentions

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The vendors mentioned below were either featured in the 2022 edition of this Magic Quadrant or have
a presence in the market that will make them of interest to organizations in addition to the vendors
covered in this year’s Magic Quadrant.

While they met this Magic Quadrant’s other inclusion criteria, the following vendors were not among
the top 20 organizations in the CII defined by Gartner for this Magic Quadrant. Data inputs used to
determine customer interest include the following measures, among others:

Gartner customer search and inquiry volume and trend data

Volume of job listings on a range of employment websites in the U.S., Europe and China

Frequency of mentions as a competitor to other cloud DBMS vendors in reviews on Gartner’s Peer
Insights forum during the year ending March 2023

Noninclusion due to the CII should not reflect negatively on these vendors or products.

The following list does not include all notable vendors absent from this Magic Quadrant. Gartner
clients are encouraged to request inquiry calls to discuss these and other notable vendors. The list is
in alphabetical order.

Aiven

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Aiven offers a range of open-source cloud-
based products and services. It operates worldwide with offices in Amsterdam, Auckland, Berlin,
Boston, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.

Aiven provides a unified platform to deploy and manage cloud database services including
ClickHouse, Apache Cassandra, Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, Redis, InfluxDB, MySQL, OpenSearch,
PostgreSQL, and the M3 time series database. Its platform, which also supports event streaming, is
available on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, as well as several
smaller providers. It offers these managed cloud services in customers’ own public cloud accounts
as well as its own. Aiven focuses on open-source data management services, and also makes its
own integration software and tools — such as Apache Kafka connectors and a PostgreSQL backup
and restore tool — available under an open-source license.

ClickHouse

ClickHouse, incorporated in 2021, is headquartered in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California, and
has European headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It provides the ClickHouse Cloud, based
on the popular ClickHouse open-source database system, which is designed for analytics with an
emphasis on OLAP and real-time reporting. ClickHouse’s open-source system is based on the open-
source Apache project launched in 2016.

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Originally aiming to be particularly good at aggregating and filtering very large volumes of data,
ClickHouse achieves high performance using a combination of compression, column store, parallel
processing and other techniques focused on detailed consideration of data types and layouts.

The ClickHouse Cloud is available on AWS and GCP, with a roadmap to also be hosted on Azure. In
addition to Aiven, managed ClickHouse is also available from other cloud service providers, including
Alibaba and others.

Huawei Cloud

Huawei Cloud is a leading cloud service provider in China. It offers a wide variety of DBMS products,
including GaussDB and GaussDB (for MySQL) for OLTP use cases, GaussDB(DWS) for analytical use
cases, GaussDB(for Mongo), GaussDB(for Influx), GaussDB(for Cassandra) and GaussDB(for Redis)
for nonrelational use cases. In addition, it provides UGO and DRS for database migration,
FusionInsight MRS for data lake, and DataArts Studio for governance. All are available on Huawei
Cloud and Huawei Cloud Stack for on-premises deployment.

Huawei’s operations are primarily in China, but it also has footprints in Asia/Pacific, Japan, Europe,
South America and Africa. Its two flagship products, GaussDB and GaussDB(DWS), are mainly
deployed as the replacement of aging global competitor solutions for local organizations in China,
and gained steady growth last year. At the same time, its DBaaS deployment on public cloud is
growing rapidly in China, especially for the manufacturing, retail and gaming industries. However,
geopolitical concerns still remain a challenge for Huawei to extend its global business effectively in
the cloud DBMS market.

OceanBase

OceanBase is headquartered in Beijing, China, and offers OceanBase Database, a distributed

transactional database that is compatible with both MySQL and Oracle. OceanBase is one of the
pioneers in distributed SQL technologies, with strong innovations in performance, elasticity,
availability and disaster recovery. Its product has been widely used by Chinese organizations in
finance, telecom, energy and public sector to replace aging mainframe relational databases,
especially for mission-critical systems.

OceanBase started exploring the global market in 2022 but still has a limited presence outside China
at the moment. Coming from Ant Group, OceanBase was used to sustain many data-intensive
applications across the Alibaba Group and Ant Group. In 2020, OceanBase was registered as a
business entity owned by Ant Group, and is now transitioning to be an independent technology
vendor. Currently, it offers a fully managed cloud database service on Alibaba Cloud and Amazon
Web Services.

OpenText

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OpenText offers the OpenText Vertica Analytics Platform. Vertica was originally developed in 2005.
Micro Focus acquired Vertica in 2017, which OpenText then acquired in 2023. The core analytical
platform within the OpenText software portfolio is OpenText Vertica, a massively parallel processing
(MPP) column store analytical database. It can run in Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google
Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure public clouds; as Kubernetes containers; on virtual machines; and
on on-premises or hybrid environments leveraging its separation of compute and storage
architecture. It is compatible with many modern extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) and BI
tools. OpenText Vertica’s unified analytical approach combines data in the data warehouse and data
lake for SQL, ML and AI.

PingCAP

PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, an open-source, distributed transactional database that is
compatible with MySQL. With over 34,000 GitHub stars and more than 1,200 contributors globally,
TiDB is a popular open-source database. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, PingCAP is a global
company with regional offices and business in APAC, Japan, China and Europe. TiDB is available on
all the major public cloud platforms, on-premises and as a fully managed cloud service. It is mainly
deployed for demanding modern applications, but also has been used in some mission-critical
workloads across e-commerce, gaming, logistics and financial services.

Progress (MarkLogic)

MarkLogic was founded in 2001 and was acquired by Progress in 2023. It focuses on solving
complex data problems. Its MarkLogic Cloud service is primarily offered on the AWS and Azure
clouds, and is supported on OpenShift, GCP, Docker Hub and Kubernetes. Progress focuses on data
management. It is built around a multimodel data platform and an integration hub. Both the
integration hub and the platform enable users to access data stored remotely through a universal
index, which enables reduced remote data movement through optimization of remote access.
Progress’s MarkLogic operations are primarily in North America and Europe. It has customers in a
range of industries, but is particularly strong in management of regulated data in the national
security, finance, insurance and life science sectors.

SingleStore

SingleStore is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and offers SingleStoreDB Cloud, a fully
managed, on-demand cloud database service that is compatible with the MySQL and MongoDB wire
protocols. It is designed to undertake mixed operational transactional and analytical workloads, as its
name implies. It is offered as a managed service on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform
and Microsoft Azure, and as a self-managed offering on private clouds, IBM Cloud Pak for Data and
Red Hat OpenShift. SingleStore’s operations are spread across North America, Europe and
Asia/Pacific. It has hundreds of customers including global enterprises across 30 verticals, with the
top three verticals being financial services, media and telecommunications, and SaaS technology

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companies. SingleStore provides its Universal Storage technology, which combines the attributes of
in-memory row store, on-disk column store and cloud object storage in a single table storage type to
support high-performance use cases for both transactions and analytics. SingleStoreDB also has had
support for vector functions since 2017 with a number of customers running GenAI use cases
including semantic search, image recognition and real-time recommendations.

Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud is a leading cloud service provider in China. Tencent Distributed SQL (TDSQL) is an
OLTP DBMS service available on both Tencent Cloud and private cloud. Its analytical DBMS offerings
include TCHouse for data warehousing, and Tencent Big Data Suite (TBDS) for a unified big data and
data lake use case. Its DBMS product family includes nonrelational products like KeeWiDB for key-
value store, CTSDB for time series, and KonisGraph for graph. Its flagship product TDSQL is a specific
offering suite compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle. It is a leading DBMS solution to
replace legacy global relational databases, and has been deployed to sustain mission-critical
applications, such as core banking systems, for many Chinese organizations. Tencent Cloud also has
a global presence outside China, with its main focus on APAC, Japan and Europe.

TigerGraph

TigerGraph is a private company based in Redwood City, California, that operates in the Americas,
Europe and Asia/Pacific. TigerGraph offers a native graph DBMS platform that runs on-premises or
as TigerGraph Cloud, a fully managed service on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and
Microsoft Azure. It also offers TigerGraph Machine Learning Workbench for developing graph ML
solutions, and TigerGraph Insights for visualization and self-service graph analytics. The TigerGraph
platform is capable of both operational and analytical workloads with real-time capability. TigerGraph
and its graph-oriented solutions are mainly used for four use cases: financial crime (uncovering
hidden networks of criminals); connected customer (connecting customers, products and services to
optimize personalization and recommendations); agile operations (analyzing data across silos to
speed up cross-functional decision making); and OEM (powering partners’ applications with an
embedded TigerGraph engine).
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Product or Service: Core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market are
reviewed. This includes current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets, and skills. We
look at products and services that address both operational and analytic use cases. We focus on
features influencing performance, scalability, availability, security and integration.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the organization’s overall financial health as well
as the financial and practical success of the business unit. It considers the likelihood of the
organization to continue to offer and invest in the product, as well as the product position in the
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current portfolio. We use Gartner published estimates on revenue, as well as our assessment of
share of market and trends in revenue. Changes in organization structure, personnel and roadmap are
also reviewed.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The organization’s capabilities in all sales activities and the structure that
supports them are considered. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales
support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. We also evaluate the variety and
suitability of a vendor’s pricing models.

Market Responsiveness/Record: This covers the vendor’s ability to respond, change direction, be
flexible, and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs
evolve, and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor’s history of
responsiveness to changing market demands. Timely creation of and fielding of a cloud offering, and
competitive feature development and delivery in “cloud release cadence” are considered.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the
organization’s message in order to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of
products, and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers are reviewed. This “mind
share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional activity, thought leadership, social
media, referrals and sales activities. We compare the consistency, channels, volume and
differentiation of marketing messages heard by prospects to those presented to analysts.

Customer Experience: This covers products and services and/or programs that enable customers to
achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes quality
supplier/buyer interactions, technical support, or account support. This may also include ancillary
tools, customer support programs, availability of user groups and service-level agreements.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet goals and commitments is reviewed. Factors
include quality of the organizational structure, skills, experiences, programs, systems and other
vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

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Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record High

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience Medium

Operations Low

Source: Gartner (December 2023)

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: This involves the ability to understand customer needs and translate them
into products and services. It covers whether vendors show a clear vision of their market — listen,
understand customer demands, and can shape or enhance market changes with their added vision.
We look for vendor awareness of customer concerns about such issues as price transparency,
license portability, migration assessment, execution and cost, security gaps, and multicloud,
intercloud and hybrid operations.

Marketing Strategy: We look for clear, differentiated messaging that is consistently communicated
internally, and externalized through social media, advertising, customer programs, and positioning
statements. We assess the clarity and consistency of messages that articulate the value of the cloud
DBMS, especially as compared to similar on-premises products where they exist and to other cloud
DBMS offerings.

Sales Strategy: This includes a sound strategy for selling that uses the appropriate networks such as
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication as well as partners that extend the
scope and depth of market reach, expertise, technologies, services and customer base. We evaluate
relationships between CSPs, ISVs and SIs; use of app stores and co-marketing; and degree of focus
on ease of onboarding.

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Offering (Product) Strategy: We look for approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology, and features as they map to current
and future requirements. We evaluate if the product strategy builds on existing product strengths and
moves toward addressing emerging market needs. This includes the response to such issues as
separation of compute and storage, CSP-managed instance definitions and availability, and response
to security requirements for object storage.

Business Model: The design, logic and execution of the organization’s business proposition to
achieve continued success is evaluated. We consider relationships to CSPs, financial model changes,
geographic and vertical adjustments driven by cloud opportunities, and design of engineering and
support to leverage cloud realities.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: This involves the strategy to direct resources (sales, product,
development), skills and products to meet the specific needs of individual market segments,
including verticals. We look at breadth and depth of vertical and industry focus. This includes
information on specific successes in particular verticals or industries.

Innovation: We evaluate direct, related, complementary, and synergistic layouts of resources,

expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or preemptive purposes. Innovation is
judged based on truly new capabilities or combinations in the market, rather than matching
capabilities of existing products from other vendors.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the “home” or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market is considered. We
examine such manifestations as local language support, on-the-ground resources, and marketing
focus on multiple geographies.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy High

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Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Low

Source: Gartner (December 2023)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Leaders generally demonstrate support for a broad range of DBMS use cases, including a mix of
operational and analytical processing, based on support for a wide range of data types and/or
diversity of deployment models (such as multicloud, intercloud and hybrid). They may support a
number of different cloud DBMS offerings. They may represent diverse cloud ecosystems, of which
their cloud DBMS are a part, or have good interoperation with such systems. These vendors
demonstrate consistently high customer satisfaction and strong customer support. Many have
mature products created for the cloud or migrated to be cloud native. They incorporate or lead
advanced features and architectures. Leaders generally represent the lowest risk for customers in the
areas of performance, scalability, reliability and support. As the market’s demands change, Leaders
demonstrate strong vision in support not only of the market’s current needs, but also of emerging
trends. These include requirements for serverless DBMS and financial governance with effective and
understandable pricing models and support for AI/ML and, more recently, GenAI. Finally, the
marketing messages, product research and development, and delivery of Leaders suit today’s market
for public and private cloud services.

Challengers

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Challengers are vendors with strong, established offerings, but they are somewhat lacking in vision
for the cloud DBMS market. It can be difficult for some vendors to improve both vision and execution
at the same time. It is normal for some to have high scores for Ability to Execute one year and high
scores for Completeness of Vision another year. Challengers normally show strong corporate viability
and financial stability, and demonstrate strong customer support. However, they lack some features
to support the latest trends in the cloud DBMS market, such as support for a broad set of use cases
or a roadmap for moving to multicloud/intercloud implementations. Although they may be lacking in
relation to some of the market’s innovative concepts, Challengers have strengths in relation to many
of the Ability to Execute criteria. They can become a threat to the leaders by widening their vision and
by market innovation.

Visionaries
Visionaries have a strong market understanding and a robust roadmap for the cloud DBMS market.
They have innovative ideas about functionality and demonstrate advanced use of new deployment
models. They may be young/small vendors and have fewer customers than Leaders. Although
lacking the market presence of Leaders, they have the potential for growth in the market due to
elements of their vision that are market leading. Alternatively, they may be large companies that have
been overtaken in the market by other cloud DBMS providers — but crucially, they retain the potential
to regain their former leadership position. Both types of Visionaries can improve their execution and
growing market share with innovative ideas that push the market in new directions. Both are a threat
to the Leaders.

Niche Players
Niche Players generally deliver a highly specialized product with a particular limited market appeal.
Often a Niche Player will not support multiple cloud DBMS use cases, but will support one, two or
more use cases particularly well. They may offer a more restricted range of products. Niche Players
may be sizable and financially successful companies but have a particular focus within which they
are successful.

Niche Players may lack one or all of the following:

-A strong or large customer base and, consequently, market share

-The breadth of functionality of Leaders

-Penetration of a broad range of industries or geographies

-Proven, mature products that present low risk

However, if an organization has a need for the specific set of capabilities that a Niche Player provides,
then it can be a good fit.
Context
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This Magic Quadrant evaluates vendors that supply fully managed cloud DBMS services (dbPaaS
offerings) for some or all operational and analytical use cases. It will interest anyone involved in
defining, purchasing, building or managing a cloud DBMS as part of a wider cloud data management
environment. This includes data and analytics leaders such as heads of data management, CIOs,
CTOs, CDAOs, infrastructure managers, database and application architects, database
administrators, IT purchasing managers — and, increasingly, business leaders who are involved in
acquiring cloud DBMS technology.

This Magic Quadrant assesses vendor capabilities on the basis of their execution in 2022 and early
2023 plus their future development plans. Because vendors and the market are evolving, the
assessments may be valid for a limited duration.

Readers should not use this Magic Quadrant in isolation as a tool for selecting vendors and products.
They should treat it as one reference point among many required to identify the most suitable vendor
and product.

Use this Magic Quadrant, which evaluates vendors, in combination with the two related documents
that evaluate particular products:

Critical Capabilities for Cloud DBMS for Operational Use Cases

Critical Capabilities for Cloud DBMS for Analytical Use Cases

We also recommend using Gartner’s client inquiry service for a more detailed discussion of
technology choices. In addition, we recommend referring to Gartner Peer Insights for peer comments
on products and services, available on gartner.com.

2020 was the first year that Gartner combined the assessment of vendors offering analytical DBMS
and vendors offering operational DBMS. This was in line with the observation that the database
market was converging, with vendors providing solutions for both types of DBMS — sometimes with
the same product, and sometimes with separate products. In 2022-2023, this trend has become
stronger. Although it is advantageous for a vendor to address both operational and analytical use
cases, it is not essential. A vendor can still be a Leader if it serves its single chosen market
particularly well.

The evaluation of the vendors in the Magic Quadrant is relative, not absolute. Typically all vendors
advance from year to year — the Magic Quadrant is a snapshot of their new relative positions. If a
vendor’s dot appears to go down or to the left in a year, it usually does not mean that it has degraded
its execution or vision. Usually, it means that the vendor advanced but other peer vendors advanced
more. The overall aggregate capability of the market represents major new capabilities for
organizations.
Market Overview
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This Magic Quadrant covers cloud DBMS services. That is, database management systems providers
of products that are managed services offered as database as a service. Those successful in this
market will typically have one or more database services in the cloud, a good market presence, good
growth, and represent differentiated and novel feature sets. Often, they represent companies with an
extensive cloud ecosystem, of which the cloud DBMS is one element, or they may have good linkages
to such ecosystems.

There has been a major improvement in capabilities across the market. In particular, cloud DBMS
systems are developing in the direction of support for the broader data ecosystems that surround
them. This does not mean that the cloud DBMS is taking on the functionality of surrounding data
management components; rather, they now consciously aim to interoperate with them.

This market continues to show growth in cloud revenue, growth in the percentage of vendor revenue
in the cloud versus overall DBMS revenue, and, correspondingly, the decreasing interest in on-
premises products.

1,2
According to Gartner’s DBMS market numbers:

The overall database management system market saw strong growth of 14.4% in 2022 to reach
$91 billion.

The 2022 growth in this market exceeds the overall software market growth rate of 11.3%.

Cloud database platform as a service share has now reached 55% of the overall 2022 market.

For 2022, 98% of the overall DBMS market growth came from dbPaaS, up from 85% in 2021.

Database software now accounts for 12.9% of the overall software market.

By the end of 2023, the DBMS market is expected to exceed $100 billion.

The Magic Quadrant selection criteria does not rely on size of revenue but, rather, on those vendors
that generate a high degree of interest. Interest can either be because of a large worldwide presence,
which does usually reflect in revenue and market share, or it can be because of owning a particularly
innovative technology. Gartner methodology restricts participants to the Magic Quadrant to 20, thus,
noninclusion may simply mean that the focus of interest was elsewhere this year. Some well-known
and financially successful vendors may not appear because they did not generate enough end-user
discussion as measured by our Customer Interest Index. This may be because their offerings and
positioning are already well-understood. Noninclusion should not be taken as a negative reflection on
those vendors and products. For this reason, we suggest also reviewing the honorable mentions
section and joining Gartner in inquiries to ensure that all options are considered in your plans.

Buyers in the cloud DBMS market are presented with a rich set of functionality, including:

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Data ecosystem support. Cloud DBMS systems are already beginning to be aware of, and
collaborate with, the other data management components around them. This does not mean that
the cloud DBMS systems will subsume the functions of those other systems; rather, they will be
aware of them and add more value by interoperating with them (see Innovation Insight: Cloud
DBMS Must Interoperate With Ecosystems and Fabrics). If anything, progress toward this is faster
than expected, with many significant vendor announcements since last year’s cloud DBMS Magic
Quadrant.

Analytical DBMS features such as the ability to access remote databases, low-code/no-code,
efficient workload management and multimodel.

Operational DBMS features such as the ability to do distributed transactions across many
processors and geographic areas and to take advantage of hyperscale architectures as well as the
ability to do hundreds or thousands of transactions per second.

The ability for DBMS to invoke machine learning to train, monitor and execute predictive models.

Generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs). While this has yet to be fully worked out,
it is clear that GenAI will have a transformative effect on data management. Advanced vendors in
this market are already articulating plans for major improvements in their products and services
through its use and demonstrating early usage in practical situations.

Financial governance. Gartner clients are increasingly demanding the ability to predict, monitor and
control costs for their cloud DBMS (see Financial Governance for Successful Cloud Data and
Analytics and The State of FinOps for Data and Analytics).

The convergence between operational and analytical systems by vendors offering both, by DBMS
systems being able to do both, or for the two types of systems to interoperate. This is why this
single Magic Quadrant evaluates vendors for both types of DBMS together with two Critical
Capabilities reports. This trend was identified in 2020 and continues even more strongly in 2023.

The trend toward open-source DBMS and open-source DBMS interface adoption. PostgreSQL and
MySQL compatible interfaces to proprietary systems are increasingly desired because of the exit
and migration strategies that they open up.

For buyers of cloud DBMS in 2023 and beyond, the market is providing greater choice, benefits and
features than ever before. It is an exciting and rewarding market to participate in.
Evidence
Gartner client inquiry service data recorded from June 2022 through June 2023.

1
Market Share: Database Management Systems, Worldwide, 2022

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2
Market Share Analysis: Database Management Systems, Worldwide, 2022 and Forecast Analysis:
Database Management Systems, Worldwide
Evaluation Criteria Definitions
Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes
current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or
through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the
subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the
overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market
dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the
organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the
quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other
vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate
those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and
understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

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Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout

the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and
positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of
market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and
future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital
for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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