Oracle takes the database lead

With the release of the Oracle Database 11g beta yesterday, Oracle pulls ahead in the War of the Giant Enterprise Databases. With all respect to all the enterprise database companies, the four main contenders remain, in alphabetical order, IBM with DB2, Microsoft with SQL Server, newcomer MySQL, and Oracle. Yes, there are lots of other great enterprise databases. But at the top tier, both technologically and in market share, the big four stand alone.

Well, actually, IBM and Oracle stand alone. SQL Server (working up from its small-business origins) is half a step behind. It’s catching up fast, but because it’s architecturally limited to one operating system and one hardware architecture, it won’t scale to giant servers; even the forthcoming SQL Server 2008 won’t make it into the very top rung. And while MySQL is maturing fast, there’s functionality that it still needs to develop before it takes down Oracle.

Compared with IBM, Oracle has been the clear top innovator in enterprise database technology for the past half-decade. Take the release of Oracle 10g—nothing came close to what Oracle offered for supporting grids. That gave enterprises a real choice between scale-up and scale-out—or both—without changing databases. Now, with Oracle 11g, the ante is raised higher, with much richer (and faster) support for XML data, really strong security and crypto, embedded OLAP capabilities, and a very rich set of programming interfaces. DB2 is now, in my humble opinion, squarely in catch-up mode.

For those of us in the technology press, it’s been easy to forget about how powerful Oracle’s core technology is. Unlike IBM, which sticks to its knitting, and Microsoft, which talks a lot about SQL Server, Oracle seems to go out of its way to talk about everything except its database. The high-profile hostile takeovers and the associated push toward applications have succeeded in transforming Oracle into an ERP/CRM company, not a database company.

Yet, let us not forget that Oracle actually is a database company, with a number of other products that, essentially, are database applications. If you’re looking for a commercial database to run on huge servers from companies like HP and Sun, you’re talking to Oracle. If you need to scale bigger than SQL Server, you’re talking to Oracle. If you want technology more advanced than IBM’s DB2, you’re talking to Oracle.

By the way, BZ Research just completed a study into database software. We’ll be publishing some of the results in the Aug. 1 issue of SD Times. But here’s a sneak preview: In terms of market share, the top entries are SQL Server, in use at 74.7% of companies; Oracle, 54.5%; Microsoft Access, 54.4%; MySQL, 43.4%; DB2, 23.5%; and PostgreSQL, 11.2%. Note that this data is for database usage of all scales, and wasn’t limited to asking about giant, bet-your-company databases.