database market share

Current database market share figures are hard to come by, so here's my take on this. Included is a discussion of how we came up with these figures.

For the impatient here's the table I put together today:

Have you any idea how hard it is these days to come up with some idea of database market share? Of course, Gartner will sell you its latest report; which Oracle cites in its claim to be number one (though it carefully defines the database market to exclude Access for example).

The database market is complicated by takeovers of MySQL by Oracle and more recently of Sybase by SAP. Vendors are coy about actual licenses and installations. And for the open source database market, its hard to argue that a download always equates to actual use.

Personally, I'm pleased to see Firebird so high up, and rather shocked that FoxPro is up there too...

So how did I come up with my top ten?

I cheated.

I looking at "interest": what is being most searched for on the web. And of course this isn't really database market share as defined by actual installed licenses, but it is an indication of interest in a particular database.

I used Google's keyword tool to check for search volumes on database names. And as a proxy for database market share, I'll be there first to admit that my methodology has a number of significant flaws:

• The most obvious is that searches does not equate to licenses.
• I may have missed out a really popular database. Let me know if there's one there I should have covered and I'll throw it in to the mix.
• There are often several ways to spell a database (postgres v postgresql). Some like sybase cover several different products such as "SQL Anywhere" and ASE (which, by the way, is much more popular search than "adaptive server enterprise" - no prizes for guessing why). And I have little doubt that I've missed some common synonyms for these databases.
• Frankly, Access is a weak search term since it could by used in so many different ways, but I'm hard pushed to refine this. My next step might be to only count things like "Access 2007" or "Access database", but my guess is that then I would be significantly under counting.

Anyway, to deal with the many different ways of referring to the same database I have merged the results of some of the terms:

• access and ms access
• sybase, ASE, adaptive server enterprise and SQL Anywhere
• postgres and postgreSQL
• sql server and sqlserver
• my sql and mysql
• firebird and interbase

But as a first stab I think you can get the feel.

For completeness, these are my search terms and their results. Note these are broad matches. And that may in itself be an issue.

Finally, I looked at the top five databases using Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=access%2C+oracle%2C+mysql%2C+sql+server%2.... It may be of concern to some that there seems to be a long-term fall off for interest in all these databases...

UPDATE:

I wanted to leave this up unchanged but also feedback a little stuff I had via reddit.com

Some of the search words used have many alternative meanings. I acknowledged "Access" in the original post, but obviously "Oracle" has its own issues. And of course, "Firebird" is a rather popular car in the US. Opps.

I trust no one is going to make any significant investment decisions based on this, right!

I'm more than happy to refine this. Any comments or suggestion welcome. Drop me a line at david dot ross at citrustechnology dot com. And of course you can Subscribe via RSS