What's a good source of information for comparison of database market shares

Question

I'd be curious to find out how the major databases compare in terms of popularity. How much of the market does Oracle have? How much does MS SQL have? MySQL, PostGre, ...? How does this breakdown in the smaller markets (e.g. small web apps, large web apps, huge corporate services,...)?

I'm looking for statistics here. Not impressions.

Thank you.

Note: I'd say the number of applications/projects based on a given db would be the measure of popularity.

Answer 1

i don't have any source, but i guess that anybody you ask will have different answers for different definitions of 'popularity', for example:

• number of developers that develop against this DB
• number of DB admins that use this DB
• number of shops running this DB
• number of servers using this DB
• number of applications running on top of this DB
• number of records managed on this DB
• number of users served by apps on this DB

in my totally noninformed view, i'd guess that the first definitions favor SQLite or MySQL, while the last few favors Oracle

Answer 2

Javier's given you an answer not all that different in spirit from mine - a set of questions. But the questions here are slightly different:

• How many copies distributed?
• How much money received?
• Volume of data under management?
• Volume of non-replicated data?

The first measure probably favours the open source products; the second favours the more expensive; the third favours the mainframes; the fourth penalizes Google. A combination of the two sets of questions will give you enough scepticism to read your way through the various documents that will give you their spin on the numbers.

Gartner used to be a source of such information; other similar analyst firms can probably also help. I'm not sure whether the VLDB web site has much to help. Google "dbms market share" comes up with Gartner - I used it to confirm my recollections.

Answer 3

From Oracle website, they are number 1.

Source

Gartner 2008 Worldwide RDBMS Market Share Reports 48.9% Share for Oracle (*)

Gartner has published their market share numbers by operating system for 2008 based on total software revenues. According to Gartner, Oracle

Continues to be #1 overall with 48.9 per cent share Continues to hold more market share than its six closest competitors combined Continues to be #1 on Linux with 75.8 per cent share

(*) Source: Market Share: Relational Database Management System Software by Operating System, Worldwide, 2008 - Colleen Graham, Bhavish Sood, Horiuchi Hideaki, Dan Sommer - June 12, 2009

The big three DBMS vendors remain the same: Oracle followed by IBM followed by Microsoft. After the big three, number four is Sybase with 3.5% market share and number five is Teradata with 3.3% market share.