The database market is in a state of upheaval. Keeping informed about database trends will help you successfully navigate the changing landscape.

Databases are proliferating like, well, cockroaches. The overall database market is expected to reach $50 billion by 2017, according to IDC, with the landscape changing quickly among many new players.

Deep, impactful forces are underneath these changes,said Tarun Thakur, co-founder and CEO of cloud data recovery startup Datos IO, who mentions economics, open source databases, new applications and the cloud among them.

Not too long ago, a database could process transactions or perform analytics, but not both and certainly not at the same time. But new systems have OLAP (online analytical processing) and OLTP (online transaction processing) running simultaneously, a function called hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP).

All the major database providers — SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Teradata — now offer this capability along with upstarts including VoltDB, NuoDB, Clustrix, MemSQL and Splice Machine.

Gartner coined the HTAP moniker and outlined four key benefits: data doesn’t have to move from operational databases to data warehouses; transactional data is readily available for analytics when created; drill-down from analytic aggregates always points to fresh HTAP application data; and you eliminate or at least reduce the need for multiple copies of the same data.

Click here for some of the most significant database trends!