Catching Up
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Now this is the type of survey that those of us at SQLServerCentral.com like to see: SQL Server catching up in market share or Oracle and DB2. It's still Oracle over 40%, in the lead by a mile and DB2 21% with SQL Server almost 17%, but growing. Lots of those Oracle and DB2 installations are entrenched, so SQL Server is breaking new ground.
What was interesting to me is that MySQL and PostgeSQL weren't listed in the survey. It starts to make me wonder how the survey was done since I know MySQL has a wide audience. I suppose it could be just business use, which I think is growing for the Open Source guys, but not anywhere near what the big 3 have.
At the recent Colorado Code Camp someone asked me what I saw for the future of SQL Server. I had to stop for a minute, but one of the things I see long term is that MySQL will make more inroads on Oracle and DB2 than SQL Server. I think this mostly because it will hammer them on the *nix platforms, especially Linux, but I guess we'll see.
All of these are good products and can handle the load in many situations. I happen to believe in SQL Server and not only think it can handle the load, but think it's easier to build solutions with SQL Server as the backend. Especially since most of the clients out there are still running Windows.
These surveys are always shaded in one direction; that's the nature of statistics. But it's good to see the product that I've made my career's work doing well.
Steve Jones
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Having used all of the DB products (including MySQL and PostgreSQL), I have to say that for both development and administrative productivity there is no match for SQL Server. I think Microsoft's move to have SQL Server Express available for free will create a huge swing in market share. I know of many implementations of MySQL or PostgreSQL that are used solely because it is available for free. Once people get a taste of SQL Server in the Express edition, some will move up and start to use it bigger and better solutions.
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Market share is the share of license revenue. That means of all the money available to spend by entities for RDBMS, Oracle has 44.6% of that money and so on.
Since MySQL and PostGres essentially have no license revenue they would have essentially no market share. It doesn't mean they aren't popular and used; it just means no one spends money on their licenses.
So you can't use market share as an effective analysis of the percentage how many instances are installed. Given the fact that Oracle is almost always installed with its Enterprise edition while Microsoft is most commonly installed with the vastly cheaper Standard edition you could reasonalby conclude that Microsoft is probably outnumbering Oracle in installed instances.
Two other tings strike me: In 1998, Microsoft had about 10% of the market share. They've increased their market share of the money spent on RDBMS by about 70% in the last 8 years.
Finally, the big three have 82% of the money spent on RDBMS licenses. Increasingly, the other 18% is being chipped into by the big three. It doesn't look good for Sybase long term and other smaller RDBMS vendors. They appear to losing critical mass.
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I am so glad I am working on SQL Server, at least I know my career is on the right track.
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