Open source to be a serious rival for Oracle?
May 25, 2006Oracle continues to dominate the database market, but two research firms think open source alternatives are poised to be a major challenge to the market leader. The analysts are from IDC and Gartner, so anything they say has to be taken with a major grain of salt. Still I don’t think Oracle can rest on their laurels, they are definitely going to have to meet the challenge head-on.
So where’s Microsoft SQL Server in this mix? I think they’re going to be the real losers to the open-source database programs like MySQL. Because unlike both Oracle and MySQL, SQL Server runs on a single platform–Windows. That’s going to limit their growth and market penetration at the upper echelon, stuff like big data warehouses and anayltics. Those markets are where growth is going to be strongest and where Linux/UNIX is also strongest.
I think most CIO’s would much rather run their enterprise data warehouse on some Linux boxes than on Windows. So the choice of OS automatically removes SQL Server from the competition, it comes down to Oracle and MySQL. There’s no doubt that for some applications MySQL is the better choice but I’m willing to bet that at the big enterprise side of things Oracle can continue to dominate.