The worldwide market for relational database management
systems (RDBMS) grew by 11.6% to £8.27bn, according to analyst
IDC.
However, IDC said the apparent healthy growth was helped by
currency fluctuations and downward pricing pressure, meaning the
market was not as healthy as the suppliers would have liked.
"There is no question that the overall trend is favourable -
companies are clearly spending again to meet their backlog of
database management requirements," said Carl Olofson, IDC
analyst.
"However, if one takes into account the weakening of the US
dollar over the past year, the picture changes to less dramatic
growth rates," he said.
There were no changes among the top five RDBMS suppliers from
2003 to 2004, with Oracle again taking 41.3% of the worldwide
market. Oracle was followed by IBM (30.6%) and Microsoft
(13.4%).
Sybase and NCR Teradata were the other two in the top five, each
with 3.1%.
In 2005, IDC expects the biggest battle to take place in the
middle market as Oracle and IBM aggressively move into the area
while Microsoft, which currently dominates this market segment,
releases its SQL Server 2005.