Page III: The market for database server software, seen as a barometer of overall software market health, grew slightly last year, fuelled in part by sales of Linux.
Sales of databases on Windows remained strong, climbing 4 percent in 2003, due mainly to strong growth of Microsoft's SQL Server database. While Microsoft gained 11 percent in the Windows market, its rate of growth has slowed, Gartner said. The company increased Windows database sales by 17 percent in 2002.
Part of the reason for the slowing growth comes from the popularity of Linux. IBM and Oracle, which in years past targeted Windows for sales to smaller businesses, have largely ceded that market to Microsoft, Graham said. Customers that might have moved to Windows are instead looking at Linux. "Oracle was the No. 1 vendor on Windows in 1999. Then Microsoft took over and has tailored Windows to make SQL Server run better. Now Oracle sees Linux as a strategic platform," she said.
Microsoft disputes Gartner's assessment of the Linux market. "Customers are looking at Linux, but they aren't necessarily moving," said Tom Rizzo, Microsoft's director of product management for SQL Server. "It's not always free. And support is a big concern for customers as well. We're one neck to choke. On open source, I don't know," he said.
Microsoft is expected to get a boost from the release of SQL Server 2005, a new version of its database server, in the first half of next year.
What's unclear from Gartner's report is the effect that increasingly popular open-source databases such as MySQL are having on market share overall. Gartner didn't include MySQL in its new study, because the researcher doesn't see the company's databases as "enterprise" class.
Other analysts believe that MySQL is steadily growing in popularity and could be taking share from Microsoft and Oracle on the low end of the market through aggressive pricing.
The MySQL database is taking over the lower-price, lesser-need market that Microsoft started with, analysts said, because that's a niche underserved by database industry heavyweights.
15%
7%
