Percona has published its second State of Open Source Database Management Report. The company identifies four forms of control that determine how much room organizations have left to manoeuvre. The vendor backs its analysis with survey data from DBAs and platform engineers.
Percona highlights economic, operational, infrastructure and strategic control as key to database management in the newly released report. A year has passed since its inaugural edition, which focused on the growing diversity of enterprise database estates and the operational fragmentation that comes with it. According to Percona, those issues have broadened in 2026.
The company has now turned the report into a survey. Percona has adder responses from DBAs, platform engineers and other IT specialists. This makes the report’s findings more concrete, citing concerns such as rising cloud spend (flagged by 31 percent of those surveyed) as well as rising licensing costs (23 percent).
Four questions around one theme
The topics swirling around database control are fundamental, focused on costs, operations, agency and adaptability. These basic necessities get challenged by multiple forces. Organizations need to cut costs without sacrificing resilience, for example, while also preparing for AI without betting on assumptions that may be obsolete within a year, and automate more operations without giving up human judgement. “In each case, control creates choices, and choices create freedom,” the report states. Then again, the wrong choices impose restrictions all the same.
Most nefariously, the report concludes that current attempts to control costs may very well impose more significant financial burdens down the line. Percona points to low complexity as a key driver towards affordable database management.
Consolidation and sovereignty
Percona has made moves to improve agency in these areas for customers. The company earlier open-sourced Everest as OpenEverest under Apache 2.0, a Kubernetes platform for running databases on cloud, on-premises or hybrid infrastructure. It also ships pg_tde for transparent data encryption in PostgreSQL, without licence fees or application changes.