A RedMonk Conversation: Developer Led Adoption and Oracle Database 23c Free (With Gerald Venzl)

James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk talks to Gerald Venzl about Oracle Database 23c Free. RedMonk is all about developers. As industry analysts we occasionally provide a quote for a press release and for the launch of 23c Free I described it as a “radical departure”. This video is about why. The influence of developers on technology decision making is greater than it ever was. So we moved from a model which was the historical top down purchasing led adoption of technology into one where the engineers were the practitioners, much more influential in those choices. Oracle 23c Free is a radical departure because for the first time Oracle has given developers, rather than enterprise IT buyers, the bits first. The model here is let's take all of the new bits, all of the new functionality, get it in the hands of developers first and let them make the market, for example it might be -- a Spring Developer needs to understand how the database is going to work with the applications they're building. Framework support is so important in developer ecosystems. So someone in the ecosystem can really be building before they even think about any purchasing decisions. How significant was the decision to lead with the developer edition? In the end it had to be approved by Larry Ellison, himself. We also talk about JSON support, and Oracle's attempts to make JSON a first class citizen in its architectures, enabling great support with common management models for both document/hierarchical and schema oriented SQL applications. The question is will a free database that supports both document and relational models, with high performance and maintainability, turn the dial for new developer adoption?

This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 23, 2023.