Apropros to my comments about databasing everything, I note that the latest Gartner database report says the market (ie, relational DBMSs) has grown by 8% last year.
Is that all? Well, that’s the year-on-year increase in sales of new systems (as I read it), not a measure of the amount of information stored in databases.
However, of more interest is the market share. As you’d expect, Oracle’s far ahead, followed by IBM, with Microsoft only managing two thirds of IBM’s share. The actual proportions are 49% to Oracle, 22% to IBM, with Microsoft at 13% and Teradata only 3%. Surprisingly, Teradata’s market share has been static. Its tools were somewhat rudimentary when last I played with it, but it is quite an industrial-strength product for high-end data warehousing – quite a growth area. Probably indicative that IBM and Oracle are successful in maintaining their presence in that market segment.
What about open source? Growth is significant, but from quite a small base, so products like MySQL and Ingres are not quite on the radar yet.
Year-on-year movement in market share is also surprisingly static. There has been a slight increase from Microsoft, at the expense of most others, but the figures show they’re having more of a struggle than they bargained for, in trying to match the product – and brandnames – of Oracle and IBM. Still, those figures definitely count for something, as Microsoft’s entry point is considerable lower than all their direct competitors, so unit sales must have shown some oomph.
Of more relevance to my earlier comments, I guess, would be number of installations, amount of data held in each system, and year-on-year changes in those figures. If I hear anything useful, I’ll publish here.
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