Gartner Says Worldwide Relational Database Market Increases 8 Percent in 2005

May 29, 2006; 05:53 AM
Worldwide relational database management systems (RDBMS) total software revenue totaled $13.8 billion in 2005, an 8.3 percent increase from 2004 revenue, according to Gartner, Inc.

"The combined category of open source database management systems vendors, which includes MySQL and Ingres, showed the strongest growth, although it was one of the smallest revenue bases," said Colleen Graham, principal analyst at Gartner. "These open source DBMS products continue to improve in terms of functionality and scalability, and DBMS tool vendors are beginning to provide support for these offerings."

The top 5 vendors accounted for nearly 92 percent of the total RDBMS market (see Table 1). Of the top 5 vendors, Microsoft was the only vendor to experience a growth rate above the industry average, mainly as a result of pent-up demand for SQL Server 2005.

Gartner Dataquest's Software research group has traditionally measured market share in terms of new license revenue. However, due to the emergence and increasing popularity of open-source software and buyer consumption models such as hosted and subscription offerings, Gartner has moved to measure market share in terms of total software revenue which includes revenue generated from new license, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support and maintenance. Professional services and hardware revenue are not included in total software revenue.

Table 1
Worldwide 2005 Vendor Revenue Estimates from RDBMS Software, Based on Total Software Revenue (Millions of Dollars)

Company	2005	2005 Market Share (%)	2004	2004 Market Share (%)	2004-2005 Growth (%)
Oracle	6,721.1	48.6	6,234.1	48.9	7.8
IBM	3,040.7	22.0	2,860.4	22.4	6.3
Microsoft	2,073.2	15.0	1,777.9	13.9	16.6
Teradata	440.7	3.2	412.1	3.2	6.9
Sybase	407.0	2.9	382.8	3.0	6.3
Other Vendors	1,134.7	8.2	1,090.4	8.5	4.1
Total	13,817.4	100.0	12,757.8	100.0	8.3

Source: Gartner Dataquest (May 2006)

Linux grew the fastest of all the RDBMS platforms (84 percent), driven primarily by Oracle, and the maturation and user acceptance of the Linux platform as a mission-critical DBMS platform. RDBMS on the mainframe platform continued to show strength, growing faster than the Unix platform, and even beating the overall growth rate.

Gartner analysts said the worldwide RDBMS market is poised for continued growth through 2010 as data management and integration take on a strategic importance in an increasing number of organizations

"The market will see healthy growth, reflecting ongoing demand for relational database management systems used for online transaction procession, which has been the main driver of growth in the past," Ms. Graham said. "The market will also experience increased demand from organizations buying relational database management systems for business intelligence and data warehousing activities. The latter factor is being driven by an explosion of data that is being captured by organizations today."

Gartner defines RDBMS as a database management system that incorporates the relational data model, normally including a Structured Query Language (SQL) application programming interface. It is a DBMS in which the database is organized and accessed according to the relationships between data items. In a relational database, relationships between data items are expressed by means of tables. Interdependencies among these tables are expressed by data values rather than by pointers. This allows a high degree of data independence.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Market Share: Relational Database Management Systems by Operating System, Worldwide, 2005." The report provides market share results for the RDBMS market in Windows, Unix and Linux platforms. The report is available on Gartner?s Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=492469.