Should Oracle fear open source?

Oracle continues to dominate the database software market but challenges lie ahead from open source, analysts say.

Research companies Gartner and IDC both predicted continued growth in worldwide sales of relational database management systems, or RDBMS, software, which enables data to be stored, manipulated and retrieved. They also said companies' need for data warehousing will remain a main source of increases in that market.

Gartner and IDC made their assessments in reports released this week on global sales of RDBMS software in 2005.

The biggest threat to Oracle's dominance of the market could be open source competitors such as MySQL, analysts said. Acceptance of open source software could change the way pricing and licensing is determined for RDBMS products, upsetting the status quo.

Colleen Graham, a Gartner principal analyst, said in a statement: "These open source [database management system] products continue to improve in terms of functionality and scalability, and DBMS tool vendors are beginning to provide support for these offerings."

But Oracle maintains the open source challenge is not a problem.

Willie Hardie, vice president of database product marketing for Oracle, told silicon.com sister site CNET News.com: "IDC did not call out the open source vendor numbers specifically, and Gartner rated all of them together as coming in at less than one per cent of the market. So it's not a significant amount overall. I don't think they even rate a mention."

A Gartner analyst disagreed, pointing out that even though open source software sellers such as Ingres and MySQL did only made up less than one per cent of the database systems software market in 2005, they showed a strong 47 per cent growth.

Gartner's Graham said: "We think it is a big deal. Granted, in the DBS market right now, they are very small players. Remember about 10 years ago, Linux in the market was a very small player? Not so much, anymore."

Gartner reported that Linux, driven mainly by Oracle, was the fastest-growing operating system platform for RDBMS. It rose 84 per cent, outperforming Unix.

Driving the open source adoption is its popularity among younger developers, IDC said. Gartner accounted for it as a maturation of the open source model, rather than a generational issue. Both see it as spurring change in the market.

Referring to the business software maker's acquisition of Sleepycat Software, Graham said: "Open source in general starts small but then it ends up having a big impact. Oracle knows this. They happened to acquire an open source vendor themselves, because thy want to get on that train."

She added: "We expect [open source database software sellers] to gain market share, and probably pretty quickly."

Candace Lombardi writes for CNET News.com