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AWS Among Leaders in Research Firm's Ranking of Operational Databases

• By David Ramel
• 11/03/2015

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) was among the leaders in research firm Gartner Inc.'s recent ranking of operational DBMS vendors.

Operational DBMS (database management systems) are defined by Gartner as relational and nonrelational database management products suitable for a variety of enterprise-level transactional applications, such as ERP, CRM, catalog management and security event management, among other things. A DBMS is an entire software system that can define, create, manage, update and query a database.

In Gartner's October Magic Quadrant report, AWS trails only Microsoft and Oracle in the Ability to Execute evaluation, while it follows those two vendors, IBM and SAP in its Completeness of Vision ranking.

In its evaluation, Gartner considered the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS, for Aurora, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL) and Amazon DynamoDB (a NoSQL document and key-value DBMS).

"AWS provides a wide range of product capabilities, spanning relational and NoSQL technologies," Gartner said in its "vendor strengths and cautions" analysis. "It continues to release new products to meet or exceed the market's demands."

It also scored high marks for its geographic availability and ease of doing business.

"Based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS supports 30 availability zones spanning 19 countries and five continents," Gartner said. "While all services are not available in all zones, AWS's cloud infrastructure is one of the largest, most diverse and stable."

The main caution about AWS concerned limited on-premises capabilities. "AWS's focus on cloud-based services has naturally limited its product capabilities for hybrid cloud deployments of DBMSs," Gartner said. "Although AWS does provide tools and services aimed at supporting hybrid deployments, customers will need to evaluate their on-premises implementation requirements carefully to ensure that AWS's hybrid solutions will interoperate with their existing or planned assets."

Other cautions included below-average customer rankings of documentation and professional services, and performance, though Gartner said the latter evaluation "may be partly attributable to customers' understanding of cloud environments and how best to use them."

Interestingly, Oracle, which edged out AWS in the database evaluation, has since mounted a full-on challenge to the Amazon cloud by announcing a bevy of new directly competitive cloud services, including an Oracle Elastic Compute Cloud.