Brand said a paradigm shift in the way information is managed by the likes of Google is starting to make the traditional database somewhat irrelevant.And end users should be wary when deploying a free commercial database -which may cost tens of thousands for an enterprise version - of lock-in and over-zealous sales people, Brand said, "just waiting to put their hand in your pocket to grab whatever they can".

"Open source offerings at least give organizations the choice to pay only for support," he said. "If a product is considered stable and functionally rich enough then organizations will often pay for good support. It's ironic though that organizations that are not willing to pay high product licence fees will quite happily pay product support fees even though the implication there is that the product needs support."

More organizations are using "freeware, pledgeware, or supportware" not just for testing but for serious production deployments, Brand said and praised the open source MySQL which is being used in development and production "in most cases".

"This is because the development and test environments should be the same to avoid complications as a result of the intricacies of different products," he said.

"Unless the develop, test, and production environments are identical there's a fair chance organizations will run into curly interdependency problems that can take days, weeks, or even months in some cases to track down."