Gartner Report On Cloud DBMS

10/27/21, 10:28 PM Gartner Reprint
Licensed for Distribution
Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management

Systems for Operational Use Cases
Published 24 November 2020 - ID G00468197 - 32 min read
By Merv Adrian, Donald Feinberg, and 3 more
Two Critical Capabilities reports provide context for data and analytics leaders into the Magic
Quadrant for Cloud DBMSs. Operational use cases for relational and nonrelational cloud
DBMSs require features for augmented operations via machine learning, multicloud scenarios
and effective financial governance.
Overview
Key Findings
■ This year’s operational use cases for cloud database management systems (DBMSs) include
traditional transactions, augmented transactions, stream/event processing and operational
intelligence.
■ Cloud DBMS revenue grew 54.8% in 2019, and now accounts for 30.8% of all DBMS revenue.
The four cloud-only vendors discussed in this research are joined by traditional vendors adding
cloud products and adding cloud capabilities to existing products.
■ Although traditional vendors continue to lead in market share, newer players are moving up the
capabilities chart. Similarly, relational DBMSs still dominate, but nonrelational offerings are
demonstrably suitable for some use cases.
■ Financial governance has been added to the list of core capabilities, reflecting the challenges of
managing costs and dealing with varying pricing models in the cloud.
Recommendations
For data and analytics leaders responsible for data management solutions:
■ Choose a product based on the likely longer-term fit to your environment. This is a fast-moving
market. Selecting a product because it has a particular hot feature now can be very short
sighted.
■ Identify clearly the processing and data styles you need to support. Cloud DBMSs for
operational use cases can differ a great deal in the data formats, languages and processing
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-24DBXALO&ct=201014&st=sb 1/25
techniques they support. Do not assume that they are interchangeable.
■ Examine the dynamic between your strategic cloud and DBMS providers. These decisions can
be independent — choice of platform need not dictate choice of DBMS. Base your choice on fit
to your required use cases.
What You Need to Know

Data and analytics leaders can use this research to guide their evaluation and initial vendor
selection of cloud DBMS offerings for operational use cases. Previous Gartner research has
documented the move of DBMSs to the cloud — the majority of the growth in the DBMS market is
taking place in the cloud (see The Future of the DBMS Market Is Cloud).
This document replaces Critical Capabilities for Operational Database Management Systems and
is one of a family of three documents that should be considered together:
1. Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems. This research evaluates selected
vendors of DBMS that run in the cloud — for both analytic and operational use cases. The
Magic Quadrant is used to judge the suitability of cloud DBMS vendors for either analytical or
operational use, or for both.
2. Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Analytical Use Cases. This
evaluates particular cloud DBMS products provided by the vendors in the Magic Quadrant for
their suitability to support four analytical use cases, using 13 core capabilities. The findings
from this document feed into the evaluations of the cloud DBMS vendors in the Magic
Quadrant.
3. Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Operational Use Cases (this
document). This evaluates particular cloud DBMS products provided by the vendors in the
Magic Quadrant for their suitability to support four operational use cases, using 13 core
capabilities.
Most of the capabilities are common to the two Critical Capabilities documents, but may be
interpreted differently for the analytical and operational use cases. The scores for each capability
may also carry different weights in each document. The Critical Capabilities research evaluates
individual products — each vendor has identified the product that it wishes to represent it in the
research. For each vendor in the Magic Quadrant, there may be the same, or two different,
products in each of the Critical Capabilities documents.
Enterprises use cloud DBMSs for operational use cases to provide support for:
■ Intercloud, multicloud and hybrid operation — It is increasingly a requirement that operations

be performed that may be deployed across multiple clouds, that involve both the cloud and on-
premises storage, or that involve data exchange between clouds.
■ Multiple data types — It is now common for transactions, interactions and observations to
involve a wide variety of data other than structured information. The Internet of Things (IoT),
social media, video, audio, documents and weblogs are commonly used as part of these
operations.
■ Real-time or near-real-time analysis for augmented transactions — The need for analytical
results in real time or near real time to provide information to mainstream business processes
is now the norm. This may be real-time querying of analytical data stores, the mixing of real-
time and offline analytics, real-time analytics on an event stream and feeding real-time data
through APIs.
The following trends are also appearing in the marketplace:
■ The emergence of “analytics ecosystems” as the basis for competition. This is where products
or vendors are evaluated not on single product solutions, but on an ensemble of solutions that
are integrated to work together. Integration of the data warehouse, data lake and machine
learning (ML) services would be typical.
■ The use of a single database product for both transactional and analytical use cases, rather
than separate products. In some cases the same product may be used, but it may be configured
differently for the two types of use cases.
Our analysis synthesizes product information provided by vendors and information gathered from
interactions with Gartner clients over the past 12 months. The scores used here, where a score of
3.0 represents “Good: meets requirements,” will enhance the breadth of information available to
you, supporting a better tuned decision process. Most scores achieve or exceed this level.
Nonetheless, any decision process you adopt should include proof of concept (POC) tests with
your data, on your equipment and against your production business requirements and service-
level agreements (SLAs).
Analysis
Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics
Vendors’ Product Scores for Traditional Transactions Use Case
Source: Gartner (November 2020)
Vendors’ Product Scores for Augmented Transactions Processing

Use Case
Vendors’ Product Scores for Stream/Event Processing Use Case
Vendors’ Product Scores for Operational Intelligence Use Case
Vendors
Alibaba Cloud (ApsaraDB for PolarDB)
Alibaba Cloud is a global cloud computing company headquartered in Hangzhou, China, with
international operations based in Singapore and its largest investor, SoftBank, based in the
Cayman Islands. Alibaba Cloud is the largest provider of public cloud platforms in China.
In terms of operational database services, it offers ApsaraDB for PolarDB, ApsaraDB for HBase,
ApsaraDB for MongoDB, ApsaraDB for Redis, ApsaraDB relational database service (RDS) for
MySQL, Apsara DB for MariaDB TX, ApsaraDB RDS for SQL Server, ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL,
and ApsaraDB RDS for PPAS (developed with EnterpriseDB). There is also Tablestore, a key-value
and document DBMS; Distributed Relational Database Service (DRDS); Elastic MapReduce;
ApsaraDB for POLARDB, a serverless MySQL- or Postgres-compatible distributed relational DBMS
(RDBMS); and Time Series Database (TSDB). Open-source versions of AliSQL and ApsaraCache
are available. Apsara Stack offers an on-premises implementation. Integrated tools provide
backup, data movement, synchronization and other functions.
Alibaba ApsaraDB for PolarDB is a serverless, cloud-native database with effective separation of
compute and storage, a master write node with multiple read replicas, and the ability to
automatically scale in response to a fluctuating demand. It meets requirements for all use cases,
and excels at high-speed, high-volume processing. ApsaraDB for PolarDB demonstrates its
operational DBMS capability by powering the Alibaba retail sites, handling one billion orders in a
single day during the Alibaba Double 11 Global Shopping Festival.
Amazon Web Services (Amazon Aurora)
Amazon Web Services (AWS), headquartered in Seattle, Washington, offers a range of database
management services. They include: services aimed at operational use cases, such as Amazon
Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB; services aimed at
analytical use cases, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon EMR; and a number of specialized
services, including Amazon Neptune for graph use cases, Amazon DocumentDB for document-
based use cases, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), Amazon Timestream for managing
time series data, and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) for ledger use cases.
AWS is the largest cloud service provider and the largest database as a service provider in the
world by revenue, with an international presence.
Amazon Aurora is the product evaluated in this research. Amazon Aurora scored 4.0 (meets or
exceeds some requirements) for more than half of the critical capabilities for operational DBMSs.
These scores led to Amazon Aurora placing in the top four vendor solutions for all four use cases,
and a score of 3.45 or better for all use cases.
Google (Cloud Spanner)
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a subsidiary of Google, is located in Santa Clara, California, U.S.
GCP supports many database platform as a service (dbPaaS) products, from fully managed
versions of MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis Labs, InfluxDB, Elastic, Confluent and DataStax, to its own
dbPaaS products — Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server), Cloud Spanner, Cloud
Bigtable, BigQuery, Dataproc, Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database.
GCP has global reach in all regions of the world and customer presence in all vertical markets.
Cloud Spanner is the dbPaaS product evaluated here.
Cloud Spanner’s scores for all use cases are above “meets requirements.” With the completion of
full SQL support, Spanner is a good choice for all four use cases, particularly for transactions. Its
weakest use-case score and placement was for operational intelligence, as advanced analytics is
not yet a strength of Cloud Spanner today; however, the solution does provide Dataflow
connectors to facilitate integration with Google’s analytical database services like BigQuery.
Cloud Spanner’s critical capability scores are mostly good or excellent, except for advanced
analytics and multicloud/intercloud/hybrid deployment. Due to Spanner’s reliance on specific
hardware present only in Google data centers, multicloud will persist as a potential issue. High-
speed transaction processing exceeds requirements as expected, as Spanner evolved from an
internal dbPaaS used to support Google’s other business units. Google also documents greater
than or equal to 99.999% high availability for multiregional instances of Cloud Spanner in its SLAs
for customers.
Huawei (GaussDB for MySQL)
Huawei is headquartered in Shenzhen, China. It provides GaussDB in a range of targeted offerings.

GaussDB (for MySQL) is evaluated here. All GaussDB offerings are available on Huawei Cloud and
Huawei Cloud Stack for on-premises deployment. Huawei Cloud’s operations are primarily
focused in the Asia/Pacific region, with secondary presence in the Middle East, Africa and Latin
America.
The public administration, telecom, and finance and insurance sectors account for more than half
of its industry penetration. Huawei is focused on providing a comprehensive hybrid stack that can
accommodate the full range of data management use cases across cloud and on-premises
environments.
GaussDB (for MySQL) is a fully MySQL-compatible cloud DBMS offering that runs on Huawei
Cloud infrastructure. Huawei positions the offering for high-performance, mission-critical
workloads, specifically calling out financial services and internet applications in its go-to-market
messaging. GaussDB (for MySQL) meets requirements for three out of four evaluated use cases,
falling just short in stream/event processing. Its strongest showing was for the traditional
transactions use case, followed closely by operational intelligence. Both of these use cases rely
heavily on core transaction processing capabilities, so GaussDB (for MySQL)’s strength here is not
surprising given the full compatibility with the MySQL API combined with Huawei’s cloud
capabilities.
The solution’s relative lack of support for in-database machine learning or advanced analytic
capabilities hurts its positioning for the augmented transactions use case, which requires the
ability to execute analytic models in near real time.
Finally, no significant differentiating features were identified for event/stream processing in

GaussDB (for MySQL), though it should be noted that Huawei Cloud positions other offerings for
this use case: GaussDB (for Mongo) and GaussDB (for Cassandra).
IBM (Db2 on Cloud)
IBM, based in Armonk, New York, U.S. offers IBM Db2 on Cloud, IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud,
IBM Cloud SQL Query, IBM Cloudant, the IBM Cloud Database Family, and managed services for
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, DataStax, EDB and etcd. IBM Cloud Object
Storage serves as a landing zone and clearinghouse to IBM’s offerings for operational and
analytical use cases, and stream processing with IBM Event Streams.
IBM Cloud Pak for Data — a Red Hat OpenShift integration layer for containerized common
software services — supports multicloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google
Cloud, IBM Cloud, as well as private cloud deployments. Most offerings are also available on-
premises. IBM operations are global, with significant customer penetration in all industries.
IBM’s cloud DBMS product, Db2 on Cloud, was evaluated here and meets requirements for all four
use cases. It placed in the top four or five vendor solutions across all use cases. Db2 on Cloud
received high overall marks (4.4 out of 5) in Gartner’s Peer Insights, although its support for some
capabilities was below the mean. In this research, IBM’s support for data consistency,
intercloud/hybrid deployment, and advanced analytics in an operational context drove its strong
results.
InterSystems (IRIS)
InterSystems is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. It markets IRIS (originally the

Caché DBMS). InterSystems has a global presence, primarily in healthcare but also in other
industries such as financial services.
IRIS is available as a private, fully managed dbPaaS cloud service today, multicloud on AWS and
Azure, with the fully managed dbPaaS coming in 2020. The IRIS Enterprise version has additional
ML/AI capabilities.
InterSystems IRIS meets requirements for all four use cases, placing it in the lower to middle
range of the products evaluated. This makes it a good choice for all the operational use cases. Of
particular note is its strong showing for augmented transactions due to the strength of the
embedded analytics, ML and AI in IRIS Enterprise.
The solution received scores below “meets requirements” for the capabilities of dynamic elasticity,
and intercloud/hybrid deployment, features that were either not implemented at the time of
evaluation or not required in a private, fully managed dbPaaS. It exceeded requirements in many
capabilities, especially for advanced analytics, multiple data types and programming for
augmented transactions. It also received an excellent score for security, expected due to its
strength in healthcare.
MarkLogic (Data Hub Service)
MarkLogic has headquarters in San Carlos, California, U.S. It offers the MarkLogic Data Hub
Platform, which is delivered on the cloud as the MarkLogic Data Hub Service. It is available on the
AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds.
MarkLogic focuses on a combination of data management, built around a transactional document

store, and an integration hub that allows users to access data stored remotely through a universal
index. This index allows for reducing remote data movement through optimization of remote
access.
The MarkLogic Data Hub Service, evaluated for this research, placed in the upper-middle range for
all four use cases in this research. The product scored well-above the standard of 3.0 (meets
expectations) for all use cases.
Microsoft (Azure SQL Database)
Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, U.S. It provides a broad range of cloud

DBMS offerings. Azure SQL Database is evaluated here.
Microsoft’s offering spans the full scope of use cases defined in this market and associated
Critical Capabilities research. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its customers are
spread across a wide range of industries and deployment sizes. Microsoft is focused on delivering
a cohesive cloud data management ecosystem that spans all use cases we have defined for this
market.
Azure SQL Database meets requirements for all four evaluated use cases. It is a highly capable
DBMS with a refined pedigree going back to the on-premises SQL Server product.
Azure SQL Database scored in the top half of vendor solutions for all use cases. A particularly
strong showing in augmented transactions can be attributed to a relatively high score for
advanced analytics. Azure SQL Database supports in-memory column store indexes and in-
database ML capabilities that allow the blending of transaction and analytical processing. These
capabilities are also beneficial for the operational intelligence use case.
Other notably high scores include workload management, financial governance and dynamic
elasticity — all of which are interrelated and critical to the cloud, where managing scarce budgets
rather than scarce physical resources is rapidly becoming the new normal.
Deep integration for streaming data via Azure Stream Analytics was in preview at the time of this
evaluation. Integration with Spark Streaming is available today.
Oracle (ATP)
Oracle is based in Redwood Shores, California, U.S. The product evaluated in this research is the
Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP), available in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
(OCI) and on the Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer (ExaCC) private cloud. In addition to ATP, the
company offers the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous JSON Database, Oracle
MySQL Database and Oracle NoSQL Database services.
ATP is now over two years old in OCI and more recently on ExaCC. It has full compatibility with the
Oracle Database, with added functionality to manage the database automatically (e.g., automated
security patching, upgrades and other patches with zero downtime, automated index
maintenance, and enhanced optimization using ML).
Oracle ATP is positioned No. 1 out of all products evaluated for all four use cases, with scores of 4
(meets or exceeds some requirements). Its high evaluation is due to it being the same mature
DBMS that has been used on-premises for over 40 years. Although reports from Gartner clients
verify that Oracle’s promise of low cost is proven, we continue to recommend a proof of concept
to verify the cost profile of different use-case workloads.
Oracle’s only low capabilities score (2 out of 5) was for multicloud/intercloud/hybrid deployment.
Although Oracle ATP has a strong hybrid capability, Oracle completely lacks a multicloud and
intercloud vision, with a strategy forcing customers to the vendor’s cloud for dbPaaS. As
multicloud becomes more important, it will have an effect on Oracle’s ability to keep existing
customers and gain new ones. Oracle has an agreement with Microsoft for colocation of data
centers allowing the use of Oracle ATP on OCI with tools and applications on Microsoft Azure, but
has no plans to allow ATP on other cloud service providers (CSPs).
Redis Labs (Enterprise Cloud)
Redis Labs is headquartered in Mountain View, California, U.S. It offers the Redis Enterprise Cloud
on the three major CSPs (AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure), and Redis Enterprise Software on-
premises. The Redis product is an in-memory data store, which has primarily been used as a
cache but is expanding into more traditional DBMS use cases. Redis Enterprise Cloud was the
product evaluated in this research.
Redis Enterprise Cloud placed in the middle range of products for all four use cases, from fourth
place to 10th place. The product did its best in terms of placement for stream/event processing,
and best in terms of score for the same use case. This was largely because the in-memory nature
of the Redis product is well-suited to the type of rapid ingestion required for this use case — it
scored a 5.0 (the maximum score) for the capability of rapid ingest of data.
The Redis solution scored below a 3 (meets expectations) for only one capability, automated
performance tuning and optimization. This stems from the historical use of Redis as an in-
memory data cache whose operations were directed from application code.
SAP (HANA Cloud)
SAP, which is based in Walldorf, Germany, offers SAP HANA, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)
and SAP SQL Anywhere. SAP HANA supports both operational and analytical use cases. It is
available on multiple public clouds as an appliance on a virtual machine or as software only (via
the SAP HANA Tailored Data Center Integration program). Both SAP ASE and SAP HANA are
available as cloud offerings, including SAP HANA Cloud.
SAP HANA Cloud, reviewed here, provides unified analytical and transactional processing, against
a single copy of data. Transactions can be augmented with analytics, including predictive
analytics, multimodel graph, language processing and online analytical processing (OLAP)
engines.
SAP HANA Cloud scored near the top for every use case in this Critical Capabilities report.
Advanced analytics and multicloud/intercloud/hybrid deployment were two of many capabilities
for which it received a score of 4. Clients may also view SAP HANA purely as a platform for SAP
applications and not consider it as a general-purpose database, despite it being suited for this
type of development.
Tencent (TencentDB for MySQL)
Tencent is headquartered in Shenzhen, China. The TencentDB managed service offerings for
operational use cases include CynosDB (a distributed RDBMS compatible with MySQL and
PostgreSQL), TBase (which is Postgres-based with Oracle compatibility), and MySQL, MongoDB,
Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and SQL Server.
TencentDB for MySQL, evaluated here, is a fully MySQL-compatible cloud DBMS that meets
requirements for all four use cases. It showed particular strength for traditional transactions and
for operational intelligence, both of which draw on MySQL’s maturity in transaction processing,
adding Tencent’s expertise from its gaming leadership to enhance its high-speed ingest
capabilities. Its lower score for augmented transaction processing reflects the need to improve
dynamic elasticity and capabilities for analytic model execution to support augmented
transactions.
TencentDB for MySQL also showed strength in automated performance tuning and in financial
governance, which should serve it well in a Chinese market that is in the early stages of expansion
into the public cloud.
Context
This Critical Capabilities report focuses on key cloud DBMS capabilities for the operational use of
data. You can change our capability weightings by use case on the interactive version of this
document to suit your needs.
As explained in The Future of the DBMS Market Is Cloud, cloud-based DBMS (also known as
database platform as a service, or dbPaaS) is increasingly important and growing fast. The
capabilities, and their weightings in this year’s research, reflect priorities driven by cloud
deployment.
For example, administration and management, a critical capability in the predecessor research for
on-premises offerings, has been eliminated. But some management is still critical. As
organizations delegate the operation of their systems in the cloud, they need to be confident that
their respective cloud DBMS vendor uses the information on usage and performance gathered
there to ensure cost-effective optimization — this is captured in automated performance tuning
and optimization. Similarly, financial governance is a new capability that reflects the importance of
forecasting and taking control of your spend and how well products allow you to do so.
For several of the use cases, we have added advanced analytics, reflecting the degree to which in-
line analytics have become an expected part of many operational applications. Dynamic elasticity
is assumed by cloud users, but its implementation varies, thus it is evaluated here. And we assess
workload management for one use case — operational intelligence — that this research shares
with Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for Analytical Use Cases.
Descriptions of the use cases and capabilities appear below.
The mix of vendors also differs from prior on-premises-focused coverage. The rate of movement
to the cloud has been much slower for some vendors than others; Alibaba, Redis Labs and
Tencent may be less familiar, but have established their offerings in the early days of the cloud
transformation.
Data and analytics leaders should use this research to qualify candidates as they consider new
projects. You may find opportunities for improvement beyond your present suppliers.
Product/Service Class Definition

The critical capabilities named here address the major needs identified in this research.
Operational DBMS vendors provide key DBMS capabilities for processing transactions,
interactions, events and observations. In addition to “traditional” transactional uses (such as ERP
and financial systems), these vendors are increasingly involved in adding analytics directly into
transactional streams for the convergence of transaction and analytics use cases. We have also
seen evidence of deployments in other new use cases, such as global scalability for web
applications and emerging IoT applications involving event processing/data in motion.
Critical Capabilities Definition

As part of the research process for the companion Magic Quadrant, we relied upon ongoing
briefings from the vendors selected, an RFI issued to document specific features, and ongoing
interactions with Gartner clients as part of the inquiry process.
Advanced Analytics
The product’s ability to perform advanced analytic operations within the dbPaaS. It is evaluated on
the basis of what functionality is offered in the current version of the product and what
functionality is being used by customers.
In addition, the extent and richness of available in-DBMS analytic libraries of AI/ML algorithms is
taken into consideration.
Automated Perf Tuning/Optimization
The ability to optimize performance for queries, transactions and workloads to meet performance
SLAs. This will vary according to the workload being optimized.
Consistency
DBMS-guaranteed properties of “atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability” (ACID) to ensure

reliable, recoverable database transactions with multiple nodes accepting writes to the same data.
Strong consistency is a requirement.
Additionally, the engine can include forms of relaxed, eventual or tunable consistency for specific
use cases.
Dynamic Elasticity (Scalable Perf)
The capability to scale both up and down based on policy in response to changing workloads or
user specifications to deliver predictable performance and meet SLAs when confronted with
workload variability. Also used as an opportunity for cost optimization.
Different offerings can deliver this capability in different ways. The separation of compute and
storage can make it easier for the cloud vendor to implement this capability.
Financial Governance
The ability to forecast, budget usage, monitor and control costs by throttling, workload reduction
or other means. It can include governing types and numbers of instances used, allowed users or
groups, spinning down unused resources, and recommending and implementing less costly
storage strategies.
Cost predictability and blended pricing models are beneficial.
High-Speed Ingest
The capability for data to be continuously loaded, often from multiple endpoints and in different
formats, and made quickly available. Minimal processing is done here. Important for event
processing and real-time data warehousing, it includes forms of stream processing built into the
DBMS engine.
High-Speed, High-Volume Processing
The ability to perform computations on, and durably write, large volumes of data for high-speed
processing. This includes data with multiple data structures and formats.
Multi/Intercloud/Hybrid Deployment
The ability to deploy databases across on-premises and one or more cloud environments
synergistically, synchronizing data transparently. Applications should be able to access data
without specifying location.
Multiple Data Types/Structures
Support for data types in addition to structured data (e.g., machine data, documents, images or
videos). This includes DBMS-provided functionality for query and integration methods beyond
simply providing a field that “can contain anything” and leaving usage to programmers using
external languages.
Performance Monitoring and Admin
This capability supports administration and management during implementation and ongoing use.
It includes resource utilization, database activity monitoring, role-based activities, security alerts
and advisors. Recommendations supplement automated optimization.
Programming Augmented Transactions
Support for embedded analysis within applications as part of the processing of a transaction
while sustaining high SLAs, and/or the ability for distinct augmented analytical applications
(including the use of AI/ML) to be invoked in the completion of a transaction under DBMS control.
Security
Includes policy-based DBMS access controls (e.g., row- and column-level authorization),
encryption, data masking and obfuscation, separation of concerns and support for regulatory
standards (e.g., GDPR). Integration with database activity monitoring and vulnerability scans are
advanced capabilities.
Workload Management
The ability to manage different types and sizes of workloads without an excessive increase in
resources; the ability to handle varying and conflicting workloads without a corresponding
variance in response times; and the ability to manage the workloads to meet defined service
levels.
Use Cases
Traditional Transactions
A centralized transaction focus, with fixed, stable schema. High-speed, high-volume, concurrency,
data insert/update, ACID properties and security are important.
Augmented Transactions Processing
Transactions augmented by the use of analytics, including AI and ML, through multiple states
within the transaction scope in a single database, while maintaining low latency.
Stream/Event Processing
Involves events and observations, typically captured “at the edge,” including processing and
transmitting results to other business process stages.
Operational Intelligence
Operational and analytic operations within a business activity in separate process spaces on the
same infrastructure and the same physical database.
Vendors Added and Dropped

This is the first iteration of Critical Capabilities for Cloud DBMSs for Operational Use Cases. No
vendors were added or dropped, since there is no prior publication.
Inclusion Criteria
This Critical Capabilities research uses the same inclusion criteria as the companion Magic
Quadrant. To qualify for inclusion, vendors had to meet all of the following criteria.
Software availability: Vendors must have cloud DBMS software that has been generally available
for licensing or supported download for at least a year, as of midnight, U.S. Eastern Daylight Time
on 1 June 2020. 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.
■ Any acquired product or service must have been acquired and offered by the acquiring vendor
as of 1 June 2020. Acquisitions after this will be considered under their preacquisition identity,
if appropriate, and represented separately until publication of the following year’s Magic
Quadrant and Critical Capabilities reports.
Industry presence: Vendors’ cloud DBMS products must have referenceable production presence
in accounts in a minimum of three of the following industry sectors:
■ Accommodation and food services
■ Administrative and support and waste management and remediation services
■ Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting
■ Arts, entertainment, and recreation
■ Construction
■ Educational services
■ Finance and insurance
■ Healthcare and social assistance
■ Information
■ Management of companies and enterprises
■ Manufacturing
■ Mining
■ Professional, scientific and technical services
■ Public administration
■ Real estate rental and leasing
■ Retail trade
■ Transportation and warehousing
■ Utilities
■ Wholesale trade
Use-case support: Each vendor must support at least two of the following four use cases:
■ Traditional transactions
■ Augmented transaction processing
■ Stream/event processing
■ Operational intelligence
Geographic presence: Each vendor must have market presence in at least three of the following
distinct geographic regions. (Regional market presence is defined as a minimum of 5% of revenue
of the verified production customer base, and dedicated sales offices or distribution partnerships
in a specific region):
■ North America (Canada, Mexico and United States)
■ Central and South America
■ Europe (including Western and Eastern Europe)
■ Middle East and Africa (including North Africa)
■ Asia/Pacific
■ Japan
Market share/revenue: Only named vendors in the DBMS market segment with cloud DBMS
products are eligible for inclusion:
■ Vendors’ inclusion is based on verifiable cloud DBMS revenue from the calendar year 2019.
Each vendor must have greater than $20 million in verifiable cloud DBMS revenue from the
calendar year 2019. Cloud DBMS revenue is defined in the Gartner report, Market Share:
Enterprise Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 2019.
■ Only vendors in the DBMS market segment with cloud DBMS products were considered; of
those, only vendors with estimated 2019 DBMS revenue that met the above criteria were
included.
Software releases and feature availability: Product evaluations include technical capabilities,
features and functionality present in the product or supported for download as of midnight, U.S.
Eastern Daylight Time on 1 June 2020.
Customers: We drew on publicly available information, feedback from users of our client inquiry
service and our industry contacts.
Support: Each vendor must provide support for its CDBMS product(s). For an open-source DBMS,
maintenance and support must be available from a vendor that owns or has substantial control
over the source code, and offers it under an open-source license, such as the General Public
License (GPL) or Apache License. However, only the core DBMS engine needs to be under the
open-source license to classify as an open-source DBMS. The products in this report are
enhanced with vendor additions, but the vendors also offer and support open-source-only versions
of those products.
Services: Vendors participating in the cloud DBMS market must demonstrate their ability to deliver
the necessary services to support operational systems via the establishment and delivery of
support processes, professional services and/or committed resources and budget.
Excluded products: 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.
■ Pre-relational DBMS products.
■ Object-oriented DBMS products.
■ Data grid products.
■ Complex-event processing (CEP) or streaming-data-only services.
■ Analytic and BI solutions that only offer an analytical DBMS that is limited specifically to the
vendor’s own analytic and BI solution, or whose customers exhibit only using the solution within
the same vendor stack.
■ Query service engines.
■ Vendors of data virtualization, data fabric and data federation that do not provide data
persistence of its own.
Table 1: Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases
Augmented
Critical Traditional Stream/Event
Transactions
Capabilities Transactions Processing
Processing
Advanced Analytics 0% 5% 5%
Automated Perf 10% 5% 5%

Tuning/Optimization
Consistency 15% 15% 5%
Dynamic Elasticity 10% 10% 15%

(Scalable Perf)
Financial Governance 15% 10% 10%
Augmented
Critical Traditional Stream/Event
Transactions
Capabilities Transactions Processing
Processing
High-Speed Ingest 5% 5% 10%
High-Speed, High- 15% 10% 10%

Volume Processing
Multi/Intercloud/Hybrid 5% 5% 10%
Deployment
Multiple Data 5% 5% 5%
Types/Structures
Performance 10% 5% 5%
Monitoring and Admin
Programming 0% 15% 10%

Augmented
Transactions
Security 10% 10% 10%
Workload Management 0% 0% 0%
As of 1 October 2020
This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of
products/services. Each capability is then weighed in terms of its relative importance for specific
product/service use cases.
Each of the products/services that meet our inclusion criteria has been evaluated on the critical
capabilities on a scale from 1.0 to 5.0.
Critical Capabilities Rating
Table 2: Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities
Alibaba Amazon
Huawei
Cloud Web Google
Critical (GaussDB
(ApsaraDB Services (Cloud
Capabilities for
for (Amazon Spanner)
MySQL)
PolarDB) Aurora)
Advanced Analytics 3.0 4.0 2.0 3.0
Automated Perf 3.0 3.0 3.0 2.5

Tuning/Optimization
Consistency 3.0 3.0 4.0 3.5
Dynamic Elasticity 4.0 4.0 3.0 3.0

(Scalable Perf)
Financial Governance 3.0 4.0 3.0 3.5
High-Speed Ingest 3.0 4.0 3.5 3.0
High-Speed, High- 4.0 4.0 4.0 4.0

Volume Processing
Multi/Intercloud/Hybrid 2.5 2.0 2.0 2.5

Deployment
Multiple Data 3.0 3.0 3.0 2.5

Types/Structures
Performance 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.0

Monitoring and Admin
Alibaba Amazon
Huawei
Cloud Web Google
Critical (GaussDB
Capabilities for
MySQL)
PolarDB) Aurora)
Programming 3.5 4.0 3.0 2.0

Augmented
Transactions
Security 3.0 3.0 4.0 3.0
Workload Management 3.0 4.0 3.0 3.0
Table 3 shows the product/service scores for each use case. The scores, which are generated by
multiplying the use-case weightings by the product/service ratings, summarize how well the
critical capabilities are met for each use case.
Table 3: Product Score in Use Cases
Alibaba Amazon
Huawei
Cloud Web Google
Use (GaussDB
Cases for
MySQL)
PolarDB) Aurora)
Traditional 3.23 3.45 3.38 3.20

Transactions
Augmented 3.25 3.53 3.28 3.00

Transactions
Processing
Alibaba Amazon
Huawei
Cloud Web Google
Use (GaussDB
Cases for
MySQL)
PolarDB) Aurora)
Stream/Event 3.25 3.53 3.15 2.98

Processing
Operational 3.15 3.50 3.13 3.13

Intelligence
To determine an overall score for each product/service in the use cases, multiply the ratings in
Table 2 by the weightings shown in Table 1.
Evidence
Our analysis in this Critical Capabilities is based on information gathered from interactions with
Gartner clients during the 12 months to June 2020.
We also took account of:
■ Earlier information and any news about vendors’ products, customers and finances that came
to light during the time frame for our analysis.
■ The findings in:
■ Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2019
■ Market Share: Enterprise Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 2019
■ Gartner Peer Insights
Critical Capabilities Methodology

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products or
services. Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importance for specific product
or service use cases. Next, products/services are rated in terms of how well they achieve each of
the critical capabilities. A score that summarizes how well they meet the critical capabilities for
each use case is then calculated for each product/service.
"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate products/services in a class in terms of their
quality and performance. Gartner recommends that users consider the set of critical capabilities
as some of the most important criteria for acquisition decisions.
In defining the product/service category for evaluation, the analyst first identifies the leading uses
for the products/services in this market. What needs are end-users looking to fulfill, when
considering products/services in this market? Use cases should match common client
deployment scenarios. These distinct client scenarios define the Use Cases.
The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities. These capabilities are generalized groups of
features commonly required by this class of products/services. Each capability is assigned a level
of importance in fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features are more important than
others, depending on the use case being evaluated.
Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms of how well it delivers each capability, on a
five-point scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for all vendors, allowing easy
comparisons between the different sets of features.
Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:
1 = Poor or Absent: most or all defined requirements for a capability are not achieved
2 = Fair: some requirements are not achieved
3 = Good: meets requirements
4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements
5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements
To determine an overall score for each product in the use cases, the product ratings are multiplied
by the weightings to come up with the product score in use cases.
The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not represent all capabilities for any product;
therefore, may not represent those most important for a specific use situation or business
objective. Clients should use a critical capabilities analysis as one of several sources of input
about a product before making a product/service decision.
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and its affiliates. This publication may not be reproduced or distributed in any form without Gartner's prior
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Gartner Report On Cloud DBMS

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Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management

By Merv Adrian, Donald Feinberg, and 3 more

techniques they support. Do not assume that they are interchangeable.

What You Need to Know

■ Intercloud, multicloud and hybrid operation — It is increasingly a requirement that operations

The following trends are also appearing in the marketplace:

Vendors’ Product Scores for Traditional Transactions Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2020)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Augmented Transactions Processing

Source: Gartner (November 2020)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Stream/Event Processing Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2020)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Operational Intelligence Use Case

Source: Gartner (November 2020)

Alibaba Cloud (ApsaraDB for PolarDB)

Amazon Web Services (Amazon Aurora)

Google (Cloud Spanner)

Cloud Spanner is the dbPaaS product evaluated here.

Huawei (GaussDB for MySQL)

Huawei is headquartered in Shenzhen, China. It provides GaussDB in a range of targeted offerings.

Finally, no significant differentiating features were identified for event/stream processing in

IBM (Db2 on Cloud)

InterSystems is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. It markets IRIS (originally the

MarkLogic (Data Hub Service)

MarkLogic focuses on a combination of data management, built around a transactional document

Microsoft (Azure SQL Database)

Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, U.S. It provides a broad range of cloud

Redis Labs (Enterprise Cloud)

SAP (HANA Cloud)

Tencent (TencentDB for MySQL)

Product/Service Class Definition

Critical Capabilities Definition

Automated Perf Tuning/Optimization

DBMS-guaranteed properties of “atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability” (ACID) to ensure

Dynamic Elasticity (Scalable Perf)

Cost predictability and blended pricing models are beneficial.

High-Speed, High-Volume Processing

Multiple Data Types/Structures

Performance Monitoring and Admin

Programming Augmented Transactions

Augmented Transactions Processing

Vendors Added and Dropped

■ Accommodation and food services

■ Administrative and support and waste management and remediation services

■ Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting

■ Arts, entertainment, and recreation

■ Finance and insurance

■ Healthcare and social assistance

■ Management of companies and enterprises

■ Professional, scientific and technical services

■ Real estate rental and leasing

■ Transportation and warehousing

■ Augmented transaction processing

■ North America (Canada, Mexico and United States)

■ Central and South America

■ Europe (including Western and Eastern Europe)

■ Middle East and Africa (including North Africa)

■ Pre-relational DBMS products.

■ Object-oriented DBMS products.

■ Data grid products.

■ Complex-event processing (CEP) or streaming-data-only services.