Which of the two databases is most popular in business/industry? I ask this because in terms of straight revenue or market share, I suspect they're about 50-50, because US government is big on DB2. So, discounting government, military, and academia, which database vendor has the greatest share of the business segment?
+4
A:
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Being a DB2 guy I am baised. But if you believe statistics from Gartner and other consultants Oracle has a lead over DB2 in terms of revenue. I don't think anyone really estimates number of server installs and I am not going to attempt to do this either but I can tell you that we had tremendous success with our DB2 Express-C offering. This is a real DB2 but it is offered free of license charges i.e. you don't have to pay IBM to use it for development, production or even redistribution. You can get optional support and extra features for a very low ($2,995/server) yearly charge. This is the same as MySQL Enterprise. Actually, it is $4 cheaper :-)
Since you are comparing DB2 and Oracle I figured I'd direct you to a comparison of DB2 Express-C and Oracle XE on my http://FreeDB2.com blog.
Leon Katsnelson
2008-10-15 18:29:47