 Okay, we're back here live at Percona. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're here live with Carl Olofsson from IDC International Data Corp. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Excited to be here. IDC, great company. And we saw the news of Pat McGovern passing away, legend in the community just recently this past month. And condolences go out to IDC and the entire IDC family. Been a great visionary and entrepreneur. So IDC has just done some great, great things. Well, thank you very much. I think that many people in the IT world recognize Pat as not just the founder of IDC and IDG, but as someone who really established the movement that we call tech media, including what we're doing here today. I mean, it all comes from his vision that said that with the technology that's growing and expanding in so many ways, it's important to cover it in as many ways as possible and to get good data about it. He's touched on many people's lives, certainly in the tech business. He's enabled many to make a lot of money, but also doing some great work. And it's been a sad news. But life continues. You guys are measuring the market and we're here to talk about MySQL, which has certainly done well for itself. And the big question was, will Oracle kill this? And that was something that we looked at when you have Java stuff continue to be a great event. They didn't kill it. Oracle's doing well, certainly on earning side, the tide is floating their boat. But MySQL now is thriving. A new set of developers are hitting the market. New apps are hitting the states. It's a seller's market here in terms of talent. It's certainly exploding, scales the big thing. So what's your analysis? What's your take? What's going on in the market? In general? Yeah, in this database market. I think that one thing that people should be aware of is that the database market is highly varied. There isn't sort of like one small group. I mean, you know, there are a few vendors who make the most money off of database technology. But that doesn't mean that that's what's going on in terms of, you know, sort of like the way that database technology is being used and the way that it's growing and changing. In fact, what we see here at the conference is a wide variety of examples of how various technologies are being developed to work with MySQL and its variants. Because of the open source nature of the community, the technology affords a lot of different kinds of innovation. So what we're seeing is that we're developing in a number of different directions. We've got the established vendors who have their package systems that address mainly the sort of mid to high end of the market. But then you have a lot of people who are doing a variety of different things with data management. They need good, affordable, innovative, creative, changeable database technology. They're looking not only at MySQL and technologies that are related to MySQL, but also all the other supporting technologies such as are being exhibited here. We coined the term data first here on theCUBE just earlier this week, because we're kind of joking around, you know, mobile first has been the term. Now Satya Nattela and Microsoft this week have been saying cloud first. Data first is really about data at the center of the development process. So with the stacks changing, I mean, land stack was the land stack. Now you have a lot of different stacks and data certainly is at the center of it, powering internet of things. So integrating data and using it in a development framework as a top conversation. So how does this market become data first with all these variety of tooling available? What are you finding in that way? Do you have a comment on that? Well, what we're finding is that there was a time not too long ago when everybody thought that there was only one way to manage data and there's only one kind of technology to use to manage data and that you only use data for a limited set of things. And one thing that the big data revolution has brought forth is this understanding, this realization that there are all kinds of different data and all kinds of different ways of managing the data and getting value out of that data. So relational database products like MySQL certainly continue to have, I would say, not only an important role, but a growing role in that environment. But there are other technologies as well and you really have to choose the right technology for the job. There's no one size fits all or one technology that does the whole job. So IDC, you guys are experts at sizing the market. You guys have been known for market share in all the markets. How do you size this database market? You have the NoSQL, CloudEra just got a lot of funding. They're kind of like a data engine now with the enterprise data hub, that's the NoSQL side. You got a variety of different forks going on with MySQL. You have new kind of tooling developing around flash, non-compression memory, non-volatile memory compression, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, is it crazy how do you size this thing? Well, of course we typically size based on revenue because that's what our basis is. However, the revenue doesn't tell the whole story when you're talking about some of the technologies that we're dealing with either here at MySQL or with some of the other especially open source technologies in the NoSQL space or in and around the sort of Hadoop universe. So we have to look at other things as well. So we continue to size the conventional markets in the conventional way. But we're also looking at adoption patterns. We're doing a lot of survey work to try to understand what is the maturity level for some of these technologies and what are companies looking to use these technologies for? What does the opportunity look like? So we're looking at a variety of different ways of sizing besides just revenue. Jeff, what's your take on this? I mean, you're looking at as a bystander. What do you view on this marketplace? Just, it just looks like it's exploding in so many directions where I think, as you said, there used to be kind of a single best practice, a single kind of use case if you will and with the massive increase of scale and the old big data variety, multiple sources. Now the cloud infrastructure and the internet infrastructure to be able to move that stuff around and get access to it and adjust it quickly. And then now of course the compute resourcing and the virtualization and storage that really, it's kind of a perfect storm of all these things coming together that are enabling us to do things that you could never do before. So it's exciting, but I think what was interesting is the rate of growth is only getting faster and the changing landscape is only increasing. So from a buyer's perspective, it's got to be tough to try to keep on top of all these trends, all these kind of developments and still keep it focused on just trying to improve your business. What's the biggest critical success factor you see for companies trying to become the next Facebook? Because that's one of the dialogues we've seen, Carl, is, you know, I want to be like Facebook, you know? And we had, you know, Tim Callihan on earlier as Brother Mark works as well in my secret community. There's new talent coming on this. You're seeing Dropbox here, Facebook, Foundation DB, everyone's recruiting. It's a good community of developers. But the world's changing, right? You're seeing data governance on the enterprise side being a big factor that's policy-based, you know, chief data officer. And then at the organic side, you're seeing the explosion of custom sharding programs or other new things happening. So like organically, the developer community is rising. At the same time, the top down, you're seeing some management philosophies around data. At the same time, the business intelligence and data warehouse markets being disrupted. So I guess the question is, is that what do we make of all this? I mean, where's it going to end up? Is it going to settle? Is it going to be collision? What's your analysis? Well, I think ultimately what we're going to see is a constellation of data management technologies that are marshaled by some kind of management framework that's metadata-based that enables people to do what they fundamentally want to do at the end of the day, which is to be able to get the information they need when they need it and in the terms that they need it to be given to them. Whether it's a visualization, whether it's graphics or whether it's words or whatever it is. And based on whether they do a query or they do a search or they simply ask a question and look for an answer. That's an incredibly difficult problem to solve because you have so many different kinds of data, so many different kinds of management techniques. You have to do so much in the system to be able to define the data well enough that you can actually answer a simple question. It sounds simple, but it's not. It's something I used to talk about, well I still talk about it actually, is the paradigm for me is the Star Trek computer. In Star Trek, they're walking around the ship and somebody asks a question, says computer, and then they ask this question to nobody in particular and this voice comes out of the ether with the answer. Well, that's what we want data systems to do. We want to be able to ask a question in normal human language and get an answer in normal human language. It's so funny, when we had a quote on Cubist in our fifth season, and the fifth season of theCUBE, Jeff, and we always get some great soundbites. The best soundbite is that I always ask, what's going to happen in the future? Give us a prediction. And one of the guests said, everything that happens in Star Trek will be invented. Well, some of it already has been actually. Some of it has been, you're talking about it. So the holodeck, we'd like to get that for my backyard, but a lot of Trekkie fans are geeks and that's obviously well-known. But let's talk about the database world because that's now the hot sector and you look at companies that have been leaders in this, like IBM with DB2, what's your take of what IBM's doing? How do they fit in the landscape there? Obviously not here and they have an open source kind of pedigree. Well, they're doing great work. I mean, the advances they're making in DB2 are truly impressive in terms of in-memory database technology. Also, their work with Watson and how that's creating the ability to have this kind of cognitive system for getting a little closer to what I was talking about before, asking questions and getting answers. They are serving a certain part of the market. There are a lot of people though, what you need to understand is that data management isn't about one thing. It's not about being able to balance your books. It's not about being able to keep track of the shopping cart on a cloud-based retail application. It is those things, it's a lot more. You need to choose the right technology for the job. And in many cases, that technology is going to be a database, perhaps a relational database, that's going to fit into just the right slot that you need and it's got to be at the right cost level as well as have the right performance characteristics to do the job. So Carl, I wonder if you could give your perspective on the role of open source and as open source continues to grow as a way to get things done. Increasing number of open source projects, clearly we're in the middle of one of the older communities here. And how that's driving innovation one and two, what you're seeing is the enterprise response to this growth in the open source movement. Right, so I mean you could, first of all, open source environments that spawn communities like the MySQL community, obviously, engender a lot of open innovation. We've seen that right here, as I said before, there are all kinds of technologies that are closely aligned to MySQL that are popping up all over the place. And that's a great thing. It also helps standardize some of the things that we do because let's face it, even for companies that are developing data management technologies for the cloud that aren't necessarily basing their technology on MySQL, they will tell you we're MySQL compatible. So basically MySQL has become a standard for how you handle the SQL API, for instance. So it has a great effect both in spurring innovation and in helping marshaling resources around solving common problems. How standardization, yeah. Carl, final question for you as we break here, I want to get your perspective, share with the folks out there watching, why is this show important? I mean, obviously the IDC, we're here, obviously we're talking about being under the hood, a lot of the change happening, but what's the macro and micro perspective on why this show is so important? Why is Percona Live and MySQL right now such a hot important area? You know, without wanting to overstate the case, I think that the MySQL movement is still a revolutionary movement and it's still in its early stages and there's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of development going on. It's so important for people to come together, share their innovation, it's important for entrepreneurs to come here, show their wares, do business, drive revenue and get people excited about this because as a lot of my colleagues have said, Hadoop is the bright shiny object that everybody pays attention to, but MySQL is actually out there doing jobs that people really need to get done and they know how to do them. Absolutely, we totally agree. It's just the beginning, we were just talking with Tim Callaghan, new people are here, new first timers and their young developers are DevOps, the cloud, mobile, social generation is upon us and it still doesn't change the game, you still have to store the data in a database and we'll go in a database, we'll see. This is theCUBE, Carl, thanks for joining from IDC. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break live in Central Silicon Valley at the Percona Live, this is theCUBE.