IBM DB market share

[Joseph,,,]

I've seen data about database market share that shows IBM slightly ahead
of Oracle. However, looking at the data with a finer granularity shows
IBM with a huge lead in market share in the mainframe database market,
running in second place behind Oracle in the Unix market, and a distant
third place behind Oracle and Microsoft in the Windows market. In the
Unix market, the IBM market share is an aggregation of DB2 UDB, Informix,
and Sequent Numa-Q based systems.

My question is specifically what is the market share for DB2 UDB for
Unix (and also for Windows if available) if anyone knows?

Thanks,

Joseph

[Database Guy]

Joseph,,, <jo****@aracnet .com> wrote in message news:<bn******* **@enews2.newsg uy.com>...

I've seen data about database market share that shows IBM slightly ahead
of Oracle. However, looking at the data with a finer granularity shows
IBM with a huge lead in market share in the mainframe database market,
running in second place behind Oracle in the Unix market, and a distant
third place behind Oracle and Microsoft in the Windows market. In the
Unix market, the IBM market share is an aggregation of DB2 UDB, Informix,
and Sequent Numa-Q based systems.

My question is specifically what is the market share for DB2 UDB for
Unix (and also for Windows if available) if anyone knows?

Thanks,

Joseph

See http://www.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/106576.html

Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since
2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.

Why does this matter?
DG

[Mark A]

> Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since

2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.

Why does this matter?

DG

It might matter for some of the lesser databases, but Oracle, SQL Server and
DB2 will all be around for many years. I would not count on any of the
others being around in the intermediate or long term.

[Larry]

Exactly ... it's like asking what the market share figures are for Nissan and
Toyota when purchasing a car.

Larry Edelstein

Mark A wrote:

Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since
2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.

Why does this matter?

DG

It might matter for some of the lesser databases, but Oracle, SQL Server and
DB2 will all be around for many years. I would not count on any of the
others being around in the intermediate or long term.

[Darin McBride]

Larry wrote:

Exactly ... it's like asking what the market share figures are for Nissan
and Toyota when purchasing a car.

Larry Edelstein
Give the guy a break - it could just be that his PHB thinks it's
important in his justification for choosing a DB vendor. Feel free to
explain why you think it's a useless statistic, but don't presume that
he's asking for his own use.
Mark A wrote:

> Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since
> 2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
> base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.
>
> Why does this matter?
>
> DG

It might matter for some of the lesser databases, but Oracle, SQL Server
and DB2 will all be around for many years. I would not count on any of
the others being around in the intermediate or long term.

[Blair Adamache]

Says the man who just bought a BMW...

Larry wrote:

Exactly ... it's like asking what the market share figures are for Nissan and
Toyota when purchasing a car.

Larry Edelstein

Mark A wrote:

Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since
2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.

Why does this matter?

DG

It might matter for some of the lesser databases, but Oracle, SQL Server and
DB2 will all be around for many years. I would not count on any of the
others being around in the intermediate or long term.

[Larry]

Never said that he's asking for his own use. Just think it really is not
important once you know that the company behind it is a major player in the
industry.

Larry Edelstein

Darin McBride wrote:

Larry wrote:

Exactly ... it's like asking what the market share figures are for Nissan
and Toyota when purchasing a car.

Larry Edelstein

Give the guy a break - it could just be that his PHB thinks it's
important in his justification for choosing a DB vendor. Feel free to
explain why you think it's a useless statistic, but don't presume that
he's asking for his own use.

Mark A wrote:

> Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since
> 2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
> base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.
>
> Why does this matter?
>
> DG

It might matter for some of the lesser databases, but Oracle, SQL Server
and DB2 will all be around for many years. I would not count on any of
the others being around in the intermediate or long term.

[Larry]

OK ... so ... it's like asking what the market share figures are for BMW and
Mercedes. :-). Better?

Larry Edelstein

Blair Adamache wrote:

Says the man who just bought a BMW...

Larry wrote:

Exactly ... it's like asking what the market share figures are for Nissan and
Toyota when purchasing a car.

Larry Edelstein

Mark A wrote:

Note that DB2 has almost certainly narrowed the gap further since
2001. But also that the figures are for new licence revenue - existing
base figures will lag and favour Oracle more.

Why does this matter?

DG

It might matter for some of the lesser databases, but Oracle, SQL Server and
DB2 will all be around for many years. I would not count on any of the
others being around in the intermediate or long term.

[Mark A]

"Larry" <no****@nospam. com> wrote in message
news:3F******** *******@nospam. com...

Never said that he's asking for his own use. Just think it really is not
important once you know that the company behind it is a major player in the industry.

Larry Edelstein

Actually he probably wants to make sure he can get a job somewhere else.
This is the number one criteria that IT people use to choose a product.

[Joseph,,,]

Why do folks assume I'm asking for the information to evaluate the wisdom
of any particular DBMS purchase decision? I can think of many valid reasons
to want this information. Thanks to the person who actually took the
time to provide a link to some useful market share data. This data is
similar to others I've seen that only show the market share for new
purchases, not the current installed base, which is more what I'm
looking for. Although IBM has narrowed the gap in new licenses,
If Oracle is still acquiring about 60% or more of the new licenses
for Unix RDBMS servers, then the gap between Oracle and IBM in
terms of installed base is in fact widening, not narrowing.

I consider DB2 to be a better engineered product overall. For non-parallel
installations, I think Oracle installations can have a performance
advantage due to multi-version concurrency control, but from what I've
seen of the Oracle "parallel" cluster server, I don't believe it will
achieve the linear scalability that is possible with a horizontally
partitioned, shared-nothing architecture like DB2 EEE or Informix XPS.
The original research on these types of systems was DeWitt's Gamma project
that demonstrated linear scaleup and linear speedup for horizontally
partitioning across a shared-nothing architecture (see the Gamma publication
in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, around 1989 or so, for
details), and by tuning the architectures, implementations today have pushed
the envelope in terms of number of nodes before system overhead damps the
scalability to sub-linear to around 128 nodes I think. Oracle just
can't compete with this with their clustering architecture.

But DB2 is well behind Oracle and SQL-Server in number of 3rd party
COTS application support, and until IBM increases its market share in terms
of installed based, it is going to continue to be the 3rd platform an
ISV thinks about in terms of application support. That's one reason I
was wondering about the trends in installed base.

As I am the lead DBA with an organization that is committed to DB2 UDB,
my posting wasn't about an RDBMS purchase decision.

Thanks!

Joseph