Database market share 2004

[rkusenet]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp


The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by hunger for business
intelligence and analytics, according to numbers released by the Gartner Group on Monday.
With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over its closest
competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of the overall market. Microsoft
Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the market. NCR Teradata Corp. controls 2.9 percent,
Sybase Inc. claims 2.3 percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT
The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS) market growth in 2003,
which was 5 percent, according to Gartner Inc.'s Colleen Graham, who authored the report.
"[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis," she said. "You can
tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really strong growth, and they're a
data-warehousing database. That's where we're seeing a lot of this come from."
The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8 billion in terms of new
license sales. The continuing weakness of the U.S. dollar artificially inflated market
growth to some degree, Graham said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent of overall growth.
"[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7 percent," she said, after
considering that sales outside of the United States, when converted to U.S. dollars,
contributed more to vendor revenue because of currency conversion, as opposed to increased
demand.
Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent and 17 percent,
respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share overall. Because the
difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is
statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear
Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub.
Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of the picture.
Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing, found evidence that
the market is buying into the database company's grid vision and its pushing of RAC (Real
Application Clusters) clustering on commodity servers running on the Linux platform.
"Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said Hardie, in Redwood
Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in small servers, with clustering of small
servers. That matches closely to Oracle's grid model: don't buy big servers; cluster
together boxes running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the industry moving in
that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004."
The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a relatively small part of
the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment grew 118 percent in 2004, more than doubling
from $300 million in 2003 to more than $650 million in 2004.
Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this subsection of the market, with
growth of 155 percent. Oracle now controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from
69 percent a year ago. IBM, meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at 16.5 percent of
the market from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the market.
The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales of Oracle 9i RAC,
which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of regular RDBMS license fees for that company.
Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said Oracle's growing Linux lead
is artificially puffed up by those add-on RAC fees. "What Oracle is doing is, they're
migrating their own Unix base to the Linux platform," said Picciano, in Somers, N.Y. "In the
process, they're increasing the cost of software to those clients, by introducing the cost
of RAC."

"Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC option," the Gartner
report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent of Oracle RAC deployments are estimated to
be on the Linux platform."
Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming from virtually all the
vertical industries and including implementations of data warehousing on clustered RAC-that
clearly not being a solution for the needs of a niche, he said.
IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In particular, the
company's release of "Stinger," the next version of DB2, is optimized for Version 2.6 of the
Linux kernel, a move that's geared toward helping database clusters scale higher and perform
faster.
It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases and servers that rely on
multiple processors.
IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in Linux clusters, as with
DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an integrated package that combines DB2 and
eServer Linux Cluster 1350 (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solution that, according
to IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the rate of four per
hour.
Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and Disaster Recovery) as being
the key to IBM's ability to deliver high availability at a fraction of the cost of Oracle
RAC.
"With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both boxes, and they need to
license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR, you pay for processors on the primary [box]
and for one processor on the standby box. So the cost savings is much greater."
Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations where IBM and Microsoft
are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of the time we're engaging against Oracle and
Microsoft" according to Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR but also to a
retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level rather than the
core level.
Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database market. "Look at it:
It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server. "You'd
expect some growth there, from such a small base."
Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as evidence that Windows
is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than the other way around. The RDBMS market on the
Windows server platform grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market share grew 18 percent in
this segment.
Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source database
PostgreSQL.
That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from 47.4 percent in 2003.
IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market segment, which followed a nearly 12 percent
decline in 2003-a slippage Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8.
Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that the release of SQL
Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so often and so long.
"We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is coming out with a new
product? Where's each one been in the product lifecycle?'" she said. "To see Microsoft have
growth this strong, even before they release Yukon, that struck me as interesting. People
aren't waiting."

Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest in BI, Graham said-a
premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous growth driver for us, especially Reporting
Services, which we've seen a ton of customers buying and deploying," he said.
"That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL Server. We put a down
payment many years ago, and now it's paying off in terms of revenue growth," Rizzo added,
pointing to the company's release of OLAP (online analytical processing) services in 1998,
which was the first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the database itself.
"People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They asked,] 'Why is
Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most people buy it separately.' We're saying .
integrate it seamlessly into the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and
eight eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting to go down the
same path we started down years ago."

[knorth]

Stu Charlton wrote:

The number of downloads is probably a better measure of the influence
of open source products. Trying to use capitalization or revenue as a
yardstick is problematical.
Agreed, but arguably "number of downloads" is moreso. I remember back
during the dot-com boom, that was how ISVs measured their success.
Didn't get them very far...

The first example that comes to mind is the Java Developer Kit. Because
it was a free download, you couldn't look to Sun financials for "JDK
sales" as an accurate measure of Java adoption. In the ramp-up period
for Java, Sun regularly publicized the number of JDK downloads as a
measure of Java's growing popularity.

The economic effect of open source isn't limited to direct revenue from
licenses and support contracts. Companies that manufacture computers
know that open source contributes to the revenue stream from selling
hardware (e.g., 40 million web servers running Apache).

Great, but since the only major integrated hardware & software
companies are Sun & IBM, that's a rather limited set of companies.

Your integrated hardware & software company list is too narrow. For
example, HP's quarterly revenue from software was $277 million. That's
$205 million more than Borland's most recent quarterly revenue.

The more fundamental question is why you'd want to use an "integrated
hardware & software company" prism when looking at the effect of open
source software on hardware revenues.

Not every organization buying hardware to run Linux and Apache web
server will limit its vendor choices to only IBM and Sun because they
are integrated hardware and software companies.
Whither the ISV? What happens to Oracle, Symantec/Veritas, BEA, etc?

Open source clearly has a different impact on software companies than
on hardware vendors. If you're selling Xeon server boxes and RAID
farms, your revenue isn't likely to decline if there's a net gain of 6
million in the number of users of the Linux/Apache/JBoss combination.

On the other hand, if you're selling application server software, the
Linux/Apache/JBoss combo is a threat. Look at BEA's numbers for 2003
and 2004:

http://www.sqlsummit.com/Trends/AppServerMarket.htm

[Data Goob]

Neil Truby wrote:

"Jurgen Haan" <ju****@fake.dom> wrote in message
news:42***********************@news.xs4all.nl...

Stu Charlton wrote:

So the question is whether OSS eventually sucks the direct revenue out
of the market. If there are enough vested interests to fund that sort
of effort, sure, it could happen. Apache is a great example of that
effect. I think the next area probably will be operating systems.
Databases will take longer, if ever.

I think databases will happen sooner than you think.
Hardware is getting cheaper while getting faster,
storage is getting cheaper while getting faster
OSS Databases are getting faster and more stable while still being free.
The one point missing in OSS databases is support.
It's so damn hard to get any support on OSS databases.

That's why many companies still go for the mainstream databases,
for the false sense of safety (I pay for it so it must be good) and for
the support (which I still think is one of the most important issues).

There is a very widespread perception that open-source operating systems -
RedHat for example - do not provide adequate support either. We have
encountered many risk-adverse users who would rather stick with Sun, HP or
IBM because of the absence of demarcation disputes between the OS and
hardware support vendors.

RedHat is not Linux. RedHat is RedHat-Linux, a fork in the road. But I
will say RedHat has provide me with excellent phone support, with a rather
short wait-time. RH lacks a lot of admin tools, and requires a bit more
hands-on than say SuSE, so you might find yourself using the support more
at first till you get comfortable with their limited, but usable tools.

RH does have some benefits in terms of how you can manage networking, but
it isn't necessarily better than SuSE, because you have to know what you're
doing. Not acceptable in new-to-Linux environments or for those risk-adverse
environments. Fedora is a great way to get into RedHat Linux because it
doesn't really cost anything. Of course you can get SuSE Pro for around
$99 USD so the question really becomes, how much will we want to support
it for ourselves. To the extreme, you can go Linux-From-Scratch and
really DIY ( www.linuxfromscratch.org ) but you will really learn Linux.

Use SuSE and get the support with it. SuSE has excellent admin tools
and allows your people to be successful with Linux and make it work
quickly without that queasy feeling that it isn't going to work. SuSE has
been excellent support on every single client I know that uses it. They
respond quickly and typically are spot on in problem solving. IBM has been
pushing "SuSE certified" systems for some time now, so you get a lot of
support not only from SuSE, but also from IBM.

To be sure you can expect problems with any release of Linux, but you should
have someone on staff that can help you as well as a support contract. The
nice thing about SuSE is that they really only have two products, one for
workstations that actually can be a server ( Pro ), and the other is a server
product that requires a support contract or you can't really update it unless
you really want to support it yourself ( SLES ). SLES has a lot of the
features you'd expect for a corporate server environment, deeper SCSI
support, etc. I think the latest release has morphed into a better
product with Novell networking built-in, which is even better, if you
are looking for that kind of product.

[Data Goob]

da***@smooth1.co.uk wrote:

Redhat say upgrade the firmware..I assume it fixes something...SO DO
IT..

If problem persists...get Dell to quote required OS patches and apply
them.

If Dell just quote a specific OS issue then quote that back to Redhat.

If it's a known issue then Dell and/or Redhat should be able to quote
required
patches.

If it is still a problem then Redhat should be able to put in more
logging
to give problem details. Dell should be able to help after all how do
firmware
patches get created?

We did not have this problem when using SuSE Linux--or Gentoo for that
matter on our Dell servers.

Dell has a mailing list you can subscribe to that will provide you
with input from a lot of heavy-hitters who use Linux on Dell, in
addition to using paid support. Much of the problems with Linux on
Dell have to do with RedHat, not necessarily Dell. It's like any
hardware platform, sometimes it's the hardware, or software or both.

Head over to Dell's Linux support website, and subscribe to their
list for a while and you can see what people are saying--and you
can ask them what they would recommend before actually using Dell
and Linux. Dell has been pretty good at improving their Linux
support, but they have been mostly RedHat because of their resistance
to support more than one Linux version--which points to a lack of
understanding or really digging into Linux because the bulk of their
sales is on Windows. When more shops use something else besides
RedHat they will get the message and start to support other releases.

[Christopher Browne]

DA Morgan <da******@psoug.org> writes:

Neil Truby wrote:

"DA Morgan" <da******@psoug.org> wrote in message
news:1117485555.324290@yasure...

Larry wrote:

Daniel,

What makes this year different from any other? It's always
backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual
data.
Gartner also makes predictions. Not accurate ones but predictions.

Don't know if it's the same in the US, but over here in Blighty the
supposedly independent analysts Gartner have attracted a lot of
criticism for advocating off-shoring in their editorials whilst at
the same time having an active consultancy arm that, er, helps
companies off-shore!

In my opinion, and it is only "my" opinion ... Gartner Group has the
ethics of a great white shark in a feeding frenzy. Not sure about
"here in Blighty" but they are most certainly a blight: If not a boil.

They have a history of having opinions in keeping with the sorts of
monies flowing towards them.

I remember starting to _really_ disbelieve them when their "Itanium
everywhere" opinions started coming out back in about 2000.

I daresay I haven't yet seen a single Itanium system deployed. I
gather that they exist, but in such tiny quantities as to be not of
commercial importance.
--
"cbbrowne","@","ca.afilias.info"
<http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
[phone] (land)

[Christopher Browne]

Paul <pa*************@hotmail.com> writes:

That has to be market share in some shape or form, but was
completely ignored in the article which only mentioned PostgreSQL,
and even then only provided a link, with no mention of its market
share!

It is also an unmeaningful question in that the notion of "market
share" is difficult to formulate for a piece of software which, since
it does not have any organization that owns the right to licensing
fees, doesn't realistically factor in to have a well-defined notion of
either "market" or "share" of that market.

If it isn't "sold," then using the term "market" is misleading, at
best...
--
"cbbrowne","@","ca.afilias.info"
<http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
[phone] (land)

[Chris Browne]

Paul <pa*************@hotmail.com> writes:

DA Morgan <da******@psoug.org> wrote:

There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
And then there's that little problem with government requirements
around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.

I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
Sybase.

These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.

I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.

You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring
plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of
"departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the
'leap' to free software databases.

For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
PostgreSQL and Oracle.

And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.
--
(format nil "~S@~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #78. "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
"And he must be taken alive!" The command will be: ``And try to take
him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

[Data Goob]

You folks might want to get the online version of this
magazine:

http://www.eosj.com

They are talking about many of the myths-n-shit you guys are
propagating. This issue is one you won't want to miss.


Chris Browne wrote:

Paul <pa*************@hotmail.com> writes:

DA Morgan <da******@psoug.org> wrote:

There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
And then there's that little problem with government requirements
around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.

I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
Sybase.

These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.

I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.

You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring
plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of
"departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the
'leap' to free software databases.

For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
PostgreSQL and Oracle.

And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.
--
(format nil "~S@~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #78. "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
"And he must be taken alive!" The command will be: ``And try to take
him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

[Buck Nuggets]

Jurgen Haan wrote:

DA Morgan wrote:

Jurgen Haan wrote:

There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
And then there's that little problem with government requirements
around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.

24x7 is actually no problem with OSS db's like Postgres.
At the company where I work we have a DB2 DB and a Postgres DB running.
Neither of them have to be taken down during maintenance.

Next week I get to swap out two storage arrays on a 500-gbyte db2 udb
database server: the new arrays are larger and faster. Anyhow, one
nice feature about db2 is that I can add the new arrays & remove the
old ones in a relatively simple operation in which the database handles
rebalancing all data automatically, and everything is online the entire
time. Didn't think postgresql was up to that yet.
What's a big problem with postgres (and actually one of the main reasons
why we don't use it for our sensitive information) and that's that
postgres is extremely unrelyable in high TPS situations.
Scalability with OSS databases just plain sucks (if any).
Although I really like postgesql, the biggest reasons not to use it in
production for us are:

1. If it can't do everything then we need db2 as well. Standardizing
on db2 is simpler than maintaining a mix of skills, procedures,
products, etc.

2. postgresql doesn't support query parallelism or partitioning. This
means that db2 table scans run about 40x the speed of postgresql table
scans (assuming a 4-way server and typical partitioning benefits).

3. db2 is pretty inexpensive in its small-server editions (workgroup,
express, etc). So the savings of going with postgresql is more than
wiped out by the additional hardware requirements.
But still I think OSS databases are to be reconed with.

It's the same as the early 90s, Linux, what a cute little project, but
it surely will never be of any importance. Now, just take a look a the
linux population among Internet web servers.

Yep, postgresql is on track to be a cool DBMS.

buck

[Michael Krzepkowski]

Data Goob wrote:

You folks might want to get the online version of this
magazine:

http://www.eosj.com

They are talking about many of the myths-n-shit you guys are
propagating. This issue is one you won't want to miss. It uses a bizzare page reader and does not work very well with Firefox.

But they sure mention IE!!!!


Chris Browne wrote:

Paul <pa*************@hotmail.com> writes:

DA Morgan <da******@psoug.org> wrote:

There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
And then there's that little problem with government requirements
around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.

I have worked for a company (big player in its field) and had an
interview with another (a giant in its field) where they had systems
that ran on all of the major db's - SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and
Sybase.

These db's contain(ed) neither triggers, SPs, PL/SQL, Transact SQL
or any other proprietary features of any of these db's. The only
coding that varied between the db's was how to get an
autoinc/generator/sequence value and that was in some sort of middle
layer. They did make use of DRI in the db creation scripts.

I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets. I think that it's
only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.

You may want Oracle's instrumentation for terabyte-sized DBs requiring
plenty-o-nines' uptime, but there are a whole lot of instances of
"departmental" applications out there which are quite amenable to the
'leap' to free software databases.

For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
PostgreSQL and Oracle.

And there are plenty of those sorts of applications around.
--
(format nil "~S@~S" "cbbrowne" "acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/sap.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #78. "I will not tell my Legions of Terror
"And he must be taken alive!" The command will be: ``And try to take
him alive if it is reasonably practical.''"
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

[DA Morgan]

Data Goob wrote:

For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
PostgreSQL and Oracle.

What planet do you reside on?

For those of us in the US.

If those apps involve any medical information you MUST comply with HIPAA.

If those apps involve any financial information including projections,
assets, liabilities, inventories, etc. you MUST comply with Sarbanes
Oxley.

If you have more than 0 employees you MUST comply with the regulations
published last Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.

Ignore any of the above you your attorney will be looking for a
retainer. Oh and that will be for criminal defense ... not civil
litigation if you attract the wrong kind of attention.

Do you think you can comply with those laws with Firebird?
I can answer that for you.
How abot PostgreSQL?
Same answer.
You'd better be thinking Oracle, DB2, or Informix or you had better not
be lecturing others about their bad habits and criticizing others that
break the law.

So yes ... if you are storing your mother's cookie recipies I would
think you'd be pretty safe in the open source databases to which you
refer.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
da******@x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

[Jurgen Haan]

Buck Nuggets wrote:

Next week I get to swap out two storage arrays on a 500-gbyte db2 udb
database server: the new arrays are larger and faster. Anyhow, one
nice feature about db2 is that I can add the new arrays & remove the
old ones in a relatively simple operation in which the database handles
rebalancing all data automatically, and everything is online the entire
time. Didn't think postgresql was up to that yet.

Postgres doesn't have to be. The storage arrays are getting smarter
aswell. Take the NetApp storage array, you can expand, reassign disks to
a logical volume, resize a logical volume online.
And I'm not sure if it can be done online, but the head (the controller
part) should be hotswappable aswell. This way you can upgrade your 1TB
netapp to a 6TB netapp.

But if you're using a simpler array, a simple SAN or NAS, it's indeed
very pleasant to have the ability available in your database.

-R-

[Stu Charlton]

knorth wrote:

Agreed, but arguably "number of downloads" is moreso. I remember back
during the dot-com boom, that was how ISVs measured their success.
Didn't get them very far...
The first example that comes to mind is the Java Developer Kit. Because
it was a free download, you couldn't look to Sun financials for "JDK
sales" as an accurate measure of Java adoption. In the ramp-up period
for Java, Sun regularly publicized the number of JDK downloads as a
measure of Java's growing popularity.

And it's absolutely a great measure of growth when you're dealing with
a level of explosivity as Java was. Fastest growing language /
platform in computing history, and all that jazz.

Still, Sun (the company) hasn't been directly assisted by that model.
Indirectly, by association, yes: they sold more hardware due to Java.
And in the early days, through Java licenses.

All of this points to the difficulty any traditional ISV will have if
they go OSS. Hence why most of them stay proprietary.

Great, but since the only major integrated hardware & software
companies are Sun & IBM, that's a rather limited set of companies.

Your integrated hardware & software company list is too narrow. For
example, HP's quarterly revenue from software was $277 million. That's
$205 million more than Borland's most recent quarterly revenue.

I should have counted HP, yes.
The more fundamental question is why you'd want to use an "integrated
hardware & software company" prism when looking at the effect of open
source software on hardware revenues.

Not every organization buying hardware to run Linux and Apache web
server will limit its vendor choices to only IBM and Sun because they
are integrated hardware and software companies.
I look at it because someone has to pay for the software development.
The commercial OSS distributions (MySQL, Linux, etc.) are funded
through investment capital and subsidies from the hardware side of the
business.

The first approach (capital) requires a return on investment. That
usually implies a direct return, through support or professional
services. So, unless the OSS ISV becomes a support and
consulting/contracting company, it's going to have troubles meeting its
investor's desires, given how little license revenue one gets from OSS
(MySQL's ~$10m vs. Oracle's billions).

The second approach requires continued purchasing of hardware. I.e.
the software goes back to the old days of the mainframe industry and is
just "value added" to the box. It's obvious such an approach is only
sustainable as long as people buy your hardware because they love your
software. Apple is an example of this working, Sun is the counter
example.

My overall point is that OSS volunteerism can certainly support the
platforms indefinitely, but the rate of innovation will shrink if such
subsidies and capital shrinks. Companies will buy what they need.
Thus traditional ISVs may not be so dead after all.

Unless of course, the entire industry moves to a "services" model. I
know OSS advocates love this, but I don't think they really understand
the horror it implies in reality. It doesn't mean better engineered
systems, or cheaper systems, or more freedom for enterprises. It means
"Buy our software, which doesn't really work out of the box, and get a
busload of IT college graduates + 1 princpal consultant (aka.
"babysitter") for only $10m more!"

If they can't lock you in through copyright, they'll lock you in by
withholding knowledge. Which in theory sounds like meritocratic tech
utopia, until you realize the gatekeepers are the partners at the Big 5
consultancies, not Smarty Programming Wizard Independent Consultants.
On the other hand, if you're selling application server software, the
Linux/Apache/JBoss combo is a threat. Look at BEA's numbers for 2003
and 2004:

http://www.sqlsummit.com/Trends/AppServerMarket.htm

While BEA's share certainly is impacted by JBoss, it's unlikely that
was the primary or only source.

Oracle's Application Server, for example, have made good inroads, and
they're just as much an ISV (but much bigger) and just as proprietary.
Fujitsu also made inroads, but they're hybrid hardware/software , and
not OSS.

The application server market has become psychologically commoditized;
in reality, people tend to stick with the applicaiton server they
picked in the first place. Time will tell if it becomes truly a
commodity or remains differentiated , just like all those other
software areas people said were becoming commodities: databases
(nope), operating systems (MS still at 95%), security (NAS and
Symantec), etc.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of coordination to make enterprise
software, it belittles the complexity of all of this to suggest that
differentiation won't continue to be the market driver.

Cheers
Stu

[Data Goob]

Daniel,

Just for the record, and not to take anything away from Capt. Pedantic,
I did not write what you are responding to. Somebody else wrote
it, please take a moment to go back and figure out who it was you are
responding to, they might want to say something back.

DA Morgan wrote:

Data Goob wrote:

For applications that are mostly used during office hours by the
limited population of staff within a department, you don't get a lot
of value out of the difference in licensing costs between Firebird or
PostgreSQL and Oracle.

What planet do you reside on?

For those of us in the US.

If those apps involve any medical information you MUST comply with HIPAA.

If those apps involve any financial information including projections,
assets, liabilities, inventories, etc. you MUST comply with Sarbanes
Oxley.

If you have more than 0 employees you MUST comply with the regulations
published last Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.

Ignore any of the above you your attorney will be looking for a
retainer. Oh and that will be for criminal defense ... not civil
litigation if you attract the wrong kind of attention.

Do you think you can comply with those laws with Firebird?
I can answer that for you.
How abot PostgreSQL?
Same answer.
You'd better be thinking Oracle, DB2, or Informix or you had better not
be lecturing others about their bad habits and criticizing others that
break the law.

So yes ... if you are storing your mother's cookie recipies I would
think you'd be pretty safe in the open source databases to which you
refer.

[DA Morgan]

Data Goob wrote:

Daniel,

Just for the record, and not to take anything away from Capt. Pedantic,
I did not write what you are responding to. Somebody else wrote
it, please take a moment to go back and figure out who it was you are
responding to, they might want to say something back.

DA Morgan wrote:

Data Goob wrote:

I am in San Francisco this week at WWDC so my ability to do so is rather
limited. If you think it is important I'd appreciate your making any
corrections. I expect whoever actually posted it will, if interested,
read the thread, recognize their work, and respond.

Thanks.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
da******@x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

[knorth]

Paul wrote:

Maybe you could point me to a site that gives an overview of Sarbanes-Oxley for
the non-specialist accountant

"Sarbanes-Oxley Responsibilities and Techniques for Compliance"
http://www.sqlsummit.com/SOX.htm

The author is a CPA and CISA with a lot of experience doing
SOX-compliance work.

Ken North
===============
www.SQLSummit.com
www.GridSummit.com
www.WebServicesSummit.com

[hpuxrac]

What planet do you reside on?

For those of us in the US.
If those apps involve any medical information you MUST comply with
HIPAA.
If those apps involve any financial information including projections,
assets, liabilities, inventories, etc. you MUST comply with Sarbanes
Oxley.
If you have more than 0 employees you MUST comply with the regulations
published last Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.
Ignore any of the above you your attorney will be looking for a
retainer. Oh and that will be for criminal defense ... not civil
litigation if you attract the wrong kind of attention.
Do you think you can comply with those laws with Firebird?
I can answer that for you.
How abot PostgreSQL?
Same answer.
You'd better be thinking Oracle, DB2, or Informix or you had better not

be lecturing others about their bad habits and criticizing others that
break the law.
So yes ... if you are storing your mother's cookie recipies I would
think you'd be pretty safe in the open source databases to which you
refer.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
[e-mail]
(replace x with u to respond

You know for someone who talks like they understand subjects it is
clear that you don't know much more than some of the buzzwords.

Are you a lawyer? What law school did you graduate from? What states
are you licensed to practice in?

Are there differences between publicly traded companies and not? How
and where exactly do these differences start manifesting themselves?

Why don't you keep to butchering a subject like oracle and go back to
advising people about dropping the dba role?

[knorth]

>> My overall point is that OSS volunteerism can certainly support the
platforms indefinitely, but the rate of innovation will shrink if such
subsidies and capital shrinks.

Innovation propsers when there's diversity and lower barriers to entry.
During the late '80s and early '90s, Borland, Lotus Software,
WordPerfect and the SQL vendors prospered.

Today the situation is quite different. ISV's (for-profit companies)
face serious challenges.

Governments and computer manufacturers are pumping money into software
that competes with commercial products
Asian partners (Korea, Japan, China) have formed an alliance to promote
open-source software and Linux R&D. Computer companies such as HP, IBM,
Intel, Oracle and Sun have jumped on the Linux bandwagaon and signed
on Chinese Linux parters.

In a panel discussion last year, Jim Gray suggested "The thing I'm
puzzled by is how there will be a software industry if there's open
source." He went on to explain ""The key thing is [with] people who are
selling their software, the software has to somehow be better than the
free software and [if] it's not better, I'm puzzled as to what the
business model is because they can't sell it."

[michaelnewport]

rkusenet wrote:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp


The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by hunger for business
intelligence and analytics, according to numbers released by the Gartner Group on Monday.
With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over itsclosest
competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of the overall market. Microsoft
Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the market. NCR Teradata Corp. controls 2.9 percent,
Sybase Inc. claims 2.3 percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT
The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS) market growth in 2003,
which was 5 percent, according to Gartner Inc.'s Colleen Graham, who authored the report.
"[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis," she said. "You can
tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really strong growth, and they're a
data-warehousing database. That's where we're seeing a lot of this come from."
The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8 billion in terms of new
license sales. The continuing weakness of the U.S. dollar artificially inflated market
growth to some degree, Graham said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent ofoverall growth.
"[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7 percent,"she said, after
considering that sales outside of the United States, when converted to U.S. dollars,
contributed more to vendor revenue because of currency conversion, as opposed to increased
demand.
Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent and 17 percent,
respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share overall.Because the
difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is
statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear
Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race."
Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub.
Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of the picture.
Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing, found evidence that
the market is buying into the database company's grid vision and its pushing of RAC (Real
Application Clusters) clustering on commodity servers running on the Linux platform.
"Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said Hardie, in Redwood
Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in small servers, with clustering of small
servers. That matches closely to Oracle's grid model: don't buy big servers; cluster
together boxes running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the industry moving in
that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004."
The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a relatively small part of
the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment grew 118 percent in 2004, more than doubling
from $300 million in 2003 to more than $650 million in 2004.
Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this subsection of the market, with
growth of 155 percent. Oracle now controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from
69 percent a year ago. IBM, meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at16.5 percent of
the market from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the market.
The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales ofOracle 9i RAC,
which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of regular RDBMS license fees for that company.
Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said Oracle's growing Linux lead
is artificially puffed up by those add-on RAC fees. "What Oracle is doingis, they're
migrating their own Unix base to the Linux platform," said Picciano, in Somers, N.Y. "In the
process, they're increasing the cost of software to those clients, by introducing the cost
of RAC."

"Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC option," the Gartner
report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent of Oracle RAC deploymentsare estimated to
be on the Linux platform."
Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming from virtually all the
vertical industries and including implementations of data warehousing on clustered RAC-that
clearly not being a solution for the needs of a niche, he said.
IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In particular, the
company's release of "Stinger," the next version of DB2, is optimized forVersion 2.6 of the
Linux kernel, a move that's geared toward helping database clusters scalehigher and perform
faster.
It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases and servers that rely on
multiple processors.
IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in Linux clusters, as with
DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an integrated package that combines DB2 and
eServer Linux Cluster 1350 (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solution that, according
to IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the rate of four per
hour.
Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and Disaster Recovery) as being
the key to IBM's ability to deliver high availability at a fraction of the cost of Oracle
RAC.
"With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both boxes, and they need to
license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR, you pay for processors on the primary [box]
and for one processor on the standby box. So the cost savings is much greater."
Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations where IBM and Microsoft
are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of the time we're engaging against Oracle and
Microsoft" according to Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADRbut also to a
retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level rather than the
core level.
Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database market. "Look at it:
It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server. "You'd
expect some growth there, from such a small base."
Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as evidence that Windows
is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than the other way around. The RDBMS market on the
Windows server platform grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market sharegrew 18 percent in
this segment.
Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source database
PostgreSQL.
That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from 47.4 percent in 2003.
IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market segment, which followed a nearly 12 percent
decline in 2003-a slippage Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8.
Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that therelease of SQL
Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so often and so long.
"We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is coming out with a new
product? Where's each one been in the product lifecycle?'" she said. "To see Microsoft have
growth this strong, even before they release Yukon, that struck me as interesting. People
aren't waiting."

Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest in BI, Graham said-a
premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous growth driver for us, especially Reporting
Services, which we've seen a ton of customers buying and deploying," he said.
"That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL Server. We put a down
payment many years ago, and now it's paying off in terms of revenue growth," Rizzo added,
pointing to the company's release of OLAP (online analytical processing) services in 1998,
which was the first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the database itself.
"People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They asked,] 'Why is
Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most people buy it separately..' We're saying .
integrate it seamlessly into the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and
eight eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting to go down the
same path we started down years ago."

http://www.fabalabs.org/resear*ch/pa...Pape*r-OSDBMS-....

[michaelnewport]

http://www.fabalabs.org/research/pap...SDBMS-Eval.pdf