Microsoft’s SQL Server and Oracle’s flagship database software both gained market share since 2007, 
Sales of Microsoft’s database software rose 16.5 percent to $3.1 billion in 2007, mostly thanks to growth in Asia and Eastern Europe. In North America, Microsoft saw gains in sales to mid-sized businesses, Gartner’s analyst Colleen Graham told Reuters. But it didn’t add up to a huge jump in market share. Microsoft now commands 18.1 percent of the market compared to 17.6 percent a year ago. Microsoft is the third largest vendor behind No. 1 Oracle and No. 2, IBM. In the meantime, the same report found that Oracle grew its sales by 14.9 percent in 2007 and now commands 48.6 percent of the market.
As a reader pointed out the last time we wrote about a software market share report, there’s a problem with using traditional calculations to look at who is doing well in a particular software segment. It isn’t adjusted for the way open source software is sold. Using traditional methods to tally a market (sales revenues) means that open source subscriptions account for a paltry 1% of the total DBMS market (hard for a “free” or low-cost product to grab market share based on revenues). But these vendors are achieving astounding annual growth on significant sums of subscription revenues. RedmondDeveloper magazine last month reported stats from Gartner and IDC which notes:
MySQL revenues were $65 million, up 46.9 percent, Ingress was just shy of $40 million, up 100 percent, and EnterpriseDB, supplier of the popular Postgres database was up nearly 9 million, though revenues were up 282 percent.
Microsoft has been gunning to take a bite out of Oracle and IBM since it first introduced SQL Server. If it hasn’t toppled the giants, it has created a nice firm mid-market niche for itself. But because Microsoft comparitively still plays on the low end, it is the open source market that is more likely to wound Microsoft. Time will tell.
By the way, Microsoft Subnet has two excellent resources for SQL Server technical know how. Brian Egler’s SQL Server Strategies blog. Ross Mistry’s The Microsoft Back Office blog.
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