The global market for Databases is US $ 14.6 billion according to the Red Herring Software Report of June 26.
The Red Herring report also mentions an IDC statistic giving the Top 3 players in the Database Software Market as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft:
- Oracle Corp (ORCL) leads with a share of 44.6%
- IBM (IBM) has a second place with 21.4% market share
- Microsoft (MSFT) is third with a 16.8 % market share
Oracle, IBM and Micorosft thus control around 83% of the Database Market. IBM has taken around 5 years to build Viper -- the upgrade to its DB2 software. Viper is slated to release around July 28th.
A Red Herring report on Viper suggests the SAP A.G. (SAP) -- Oracle's key rival in the Enteprise Software Market has put its weight behind IBM -- looks like a "enemy's enemy is our friend" stance. The report also states the follow leading edge features in Viper, that makes IBM's Viper competitive against Oracle's database product:
The database’s biggest capability will be its pureXML technology, which will allow customers to manage both relational and XML data without requiring the XML data to be reformatted or placed into a large object within a database.
Under a relational database model, the data is stored in a table structure with rows and columns, while XML is a human readable text structure where data is assigned to tabs such as name or address.
With the volume of XML-related data exploding, such as claims forms and tax documents, this functionality will be a boon to users who will be able to work with data in both forms and get results from both types of data while running a single query. “The types of things that it might be useful for is where you want to combine business-critical data and access to unstructured data such as X-rays, photos, and videos,” said Wayne Kernochan, president of the research firm Infostructure Associates.
....Another strong feature...storage compression, will allow mainframe-like data storage compression capability for the Linux, UNIX, and Windows computing environments.
