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In its most recent report, market research firm IDC, has pinpointed software giants Oracle, IBM and Microsoft as the top 3 vendors for the worldwide relational database management system(RDBMS) software market.

The “Worldwide RDBMS 2006 Vendor Shares: Preliminary Results for the Top Five Vendors (March 2007, IDC #206061),” report states that Oracle’s market share in 2006 jumped 14.7 percent over 2005 results and now stands at 44.4 percent ranking it as the leader. Its closest competitor, IBM, holds 21.2 percent market share. Microsoft comes in third place with 18.6 per cent.

According to the study, the market for RDBMS software grew by 14.3% from 2005 to 2006 and Oracle has enjoyed substantial growth due to the success of some of its database options and the strong growth it has shown in new sites among small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) customers. The additional license purchases due to processor- (or core-) related upgrades also helped drive Oracle’s license revenue growth.

IBM has indicated substantial net increases in new DB2 sites and users across the board.

Microsoft also reported a substantial growth in sites and appears to be moving up in the enterprise because of increased acceptance of SQL Server 2005 as an enterprise RDBMS.

Key Oracle milestones in 2006 include Oracle’s free, starter database- Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, Oracle SQL Developer, a free database development tool and Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, the database design and Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) tool that helps customers manage the lifecycle of data and metadata from design to deployment and maintenance.

“Oracle’s continued leadership may be in part due to the demand we are seeing for database performance and availability as well as by falling unit prices for storage,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, Application Development and Deployment, IDC.