Remember the Oracle-botherers at Rimini Street? They are expanding third party support into open source database world

Rimini Street is spreading its tentacles beyond proprietary databases and will provide third party support services to platforms with a distinctly open source flavour, including MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

Historically, the relatively small enterprise software provider has independently delivered services for Oracle, SAP, IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server products via its near-400 full-time DB engineers to more than 1,400 clients worldwide. It is also an official provider of software services for CRM monster Salesforce.

Many Reg readers may know the company from its protracted courtroom battle with Oracle over a copyright dispute. Big Red won a permanent injunction against Rimini in 2018 that prevents it from distributing Oracle software, and accessing source code for testing or dev work, amongst other things.

Rimini's move to open source support isn’t a surprise: according to DB Engines, open source databases account for 51.1 per cent of the installed base globally as of this month. The top five open source systems include MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and Elasticsearch.

This rise in popularity, claimed Rimini Street, is creating challenges for CIOs and their IT teams, “specifically with the traditional open source support model which includes reliance on self support, trial and error operational models and community support, which do not provide sufficient support for mission-critical operational requirements.”

Well it would say that, wouldn’t it.

Self support, the company added, often equates to learn-as-you-go because DBA skills are "not readily transferrable," and it lacks the 24x7/365 responses businesses need to overcome critical issues or provide experience in areas such as performance tuning, security, virtualization and system diagnostics.

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R "Ray" Wang, principal analyst and founder at Constellation Research, provided a canned quote saying that community and self-support provision "are not sufficient for IT departments who want to expand the use of open source and also meet the service level requirements of their business."

An enterprise support model is required to close this gap in the market, he added, and "also helps simplify management of the new and changing mix of proprietary and open source databases across the enterprise."

The unified database sales pitch is one that, according to Angela Eager, analyst at TechMarketView, could "resonate" with customers as "database environments become more diverse and complex." ®