The Inquirer has a nice round-up of most of the players in the Open Source Datbase Market. Over the past few years, we have dealt with a lot of different customer DBs and here are a few thoughts based on that experience.

Overall what we have seen is an inexorable move from Oracle to SQL Server at the high end and a move from commercial DBs to Open Source ones at the low and mid-end. If you have ever used the tools which come with Oracle compared with those for SQL Server, you understand why no new developer would consider Oracle even if it has technical advantages.

In terms of popularity amongst our Enterprise customers, we see nothing particularly surprising; MySQL is the top dog by a long long way. We get some queries for PostgreSQL support and the rare one for Firebird (usually from Germany).

There are a multitude of reasons for the dominance of MySQL:

[1] Dual licence (effectively free) [2] Multi-Platform [3] Lightweight [4] It just works

Back 8 or 9 years ago, mSQL was often mentioned as a strong competitor to MySQL but due to their far stricter licencing regime, they lost out very early.

PostgreSQL gets tons of positive coverage from a technical perspective but the simple fact that it only recently became available on Windows explains its lack of market share. The effect SUN’s ratification of it will be interesting to watch.

Firebird is a very impressive DB and could easily gain market share if those who develop it tried harder to create a buzz about it. It is free, has paid support if you want it, has many years development behind it, is light in resource usage, is cross-platform and has had many features for years (such as stored procs) which MySQL only recently gained. One to watch.

[tags] RDBMS, DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Firebird, mSQL[/tags]