"There are still reasons why you might want to stick with a commercial vendor's offerings, some of which relate more to niche application needs like real-time, event-driven applications," Brand said.

"I think we'll also see a fairly aggressive push from vendors in trying to influence, if not control, the open source database development market. It's such a huge market that could potentially influence so many other market segments."

That said, Brand believes the days of databases themselves being valuable is "somewhat over", because the needs of users have evolved and the race is now on to control the business process layers of software, not just data structure and storage.

"The impact that open source databases have had on the industry is a reflection of just how critical and yet so worthless the database is considered to users who interact with an application and an interface," he said.

"Data can no longer be contained or controlled in the way we always thought it should have been, so a focus on data structure, storage, and management seems somewhat 'old fashioned'."