March 8, 2005

IDC releases its global database market share study for last year, showing Oracle, with 41.3 percent industry share, as clearly leading the corporate database market.

2004 was a great year for databases, with relational database management systems (RDBMS) spending up a robust 11.6 percent, to $14.9 billion. Overall, Oracle's database market share grew 14.5 percent in 2004.

That's great news for Oracle, whose fear of a future decline in database revenues was one of the factors that drove the company to acquire the applications business of PeopleSoft.

It's also great news despite the fact that Larry Ellison regularly quips that customers have spent too much on databases over the past several years.

Willie Hardie, senior director of technology marketing for Oracle, explains that the company did particularly well in 2004 because of the release of its 10g database, and because of increased spending in the small and medium-sized business segment.

"We've widened the gap," he says, "and we attribute it to the general availability of 10g and the adoption of grid technologies by our customers and partners."

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