IDC Says Oracle Leads Database MarketIDC Says Oracle Leads Database Market

Oracle last year led an improving worldwide market for relational and object-relational database-management systems, a market-research firm said Friday.

Collectively, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft controlled about three-quarters of the total market revenue, International Data Corp. said. Oracle achieved a 39.8 percent market share, followed by IBM, 31.3 percent; and Microsoft, 12.1 percent.

IBM slipped slightly in the market, with its growth coming mainly from sales in mainframe DB2 and in mainframe DB2 tools for database administrators, IDC analyst Carl Olofson said. Microsoft's growth, on the other hand, was tapering in a “manner consistent with the growth curve of a strong but maturing vendor."

The relational and object-relational DBMS market reached $13.6 billion last year, growing slightly, as a result of an improving world economy, said IDC, which expects the market to reach nearly $20 billion by 2008.

Late last month, market-research firm Gartner Inc. reported that IBM led the market for relational databases alone, which increased by 5.1 percent last year to $7.1 billion, from $6.7 billion in 2002.

IBM racked up $2.5 billion in sales from DB2 and Informix databases, to take 35.7 percent of the market, followed by Oracle, 32.6 percent; and Microsoft, 18.7 percent.

The improvement in the overall market was due primarily to companies deploying more data warehouses in order to use analytical software to look for ways to cut costs and make business operations more efficient, Gartner analyst Colleen Graham said.