Oracle holds lead in database market

Oracle capitalised on strong growth in the database market in 2007

Oracle again led the relational database market last year, according to the latest figures from IDC.

Overall the market grew an estimated 12.6 per cent in 2007 to $18.8bn from $16.7bn in 2006.

The top five vendors - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Teradata and Sybase - hold 90 per cent of the market, but IDC said that the remaining 10 per cent are worth watching.

"There is plenty of dynamism and growth potential in the remaining 10 per cent where differentiators that include low-cost, extraordinarily high throughput and unusual architectures are aimed at niche data management requirements," said Carl Olofson, a research vice president at IDC.

Last year saw continued steady growth in the database market as vendors put an increased emphasis on performance, manageability and flexibility, and offered features such as standby databases.

There was also a continuing trend for the large vendors to increase product offerings by purchasing smaller niche database technology vendors.