RALEIGH, N.C., Sept. 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Percona, a provider of open source database software, support, and services, today announced findings from its annual State of Open Source Database Management Report, The Way Is Open: Control, Choice, and the Future of Database Infrastructure. The report examines the challenges organizations face across cost optimization, performance and reliability, security and compliance, and AI readiness, revealing a growing need for greater control and flexibility as technology, regulatory requirements, and workloads evolve.
“Database infrastructure is being asked to do more than ever before,” said Peter Farkas, CEO of Percona. “Cloud economics are changing, AI is introducing new workload patterns, regulations are becoming more complex, and organizations are increasingly conscious of where their data and technology are controlled. The organizations that will be best prepared are not necessarily those that can predict what comes next. They are the ones that preserve the freedom to adapt when it arrives.”
This year’s report combines research conducted by Censuswide with insights from Percona executives, technical experts, and customers to examine where organizations are facing the greatest challenges in managing database infrastructure. Key findings include:
- Cloud and licensing costs remain the leading barriers to database cost optimization. 31% of respondents identify rising cloud spend as their organization's biggest barrier to reducing database TCO, followed by 23% who cite rising licensing costs.
- Performance and reliability challenges extend well beyond speed alone. 42% identify inefficiency or slow throughput as a performance challenge, while 41% cite wasted engineering time, 40% cite downtime and 37% cite difficulty scaling.
- Vendor lock-in is becoming a barrier to regulatory adaptability. 54% say vendor lock-in makes it difficult to adapt to changing regulatory requirements. More than half cite fragmented tools or policies, while 46% point to both software supply-chain traceability and a reactive security posture.
- AI readiness is being held back by architecture and people, not a lack of AI features. Fragmented data architecture and skills shortages were tied as the top barriers, each cited by 23% of respondents.
Together, these findings point to a broader shift in how organizations evaluate database infrastructure. Cost, performance, regulatory requirements, and AI workloads are increasingly interconnected, making infrastructure decisions less about optimizing for today’s needs and more about preserving options as those needs change.
“Database leaders need to build for change, not for a single version of the future,” said Farkas. “That means choosing infrastructure they can adapt as regulations shift, workloads evolve, and costs rise, without having to rebuild their entire architecture. Control and flexibility need to be requirements, not afterthoughts.”
The research was conducted in July 2026 by Censuswide, surveying 300 U.S.-based database administrators, site reliability engineers, and platform engineers. All respondents use at least one of the following database systems: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, or Valkey.
Download the full report here.
About Percona
Percona is an open source database software, support, and services company with a simple belief: organizations should have full control over their data infrastructure, without lock-in, without compromise, and without paying a vendor for the privilege of leaving. For 20 years, Percona has helped businesses run databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Valkey, and Redis securely, performantly, and on their own terms — through freely available open source software, 24/7 expert support, and hands-on database expertise. The way is open. For more information, visit www.percona.com.
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