INDUSTRY

According to market research firm IDC, Oracle is the overall leader in the worldwide relational database management systems (RDBMS) software market. IDC states in its latest report, "Worldwide RDBMS 2006 Vendor Shares: Preliminary Results for the Top Five Vendors (March 2007, IDC #206061)," that Oracle's market share in 2006 jumped 14.7 percent over 2005 results and now stands at 44.4 percent, well ahead of competing products. The closest competitor holds 21.2 percent market share. Overall, the worldwide market for relational database management systems grew by 14.3 percent in 2006. "IDC's findings show once again that Oracle is the industry's most popular database by more than a two to one margin over its nearest competitor," said Willie Hardie, vice president of Database Product Marketing, Oracle. "Customers are consolidating their transactional and business intelligence applications on low-cost server and storage grids that are available 24 by 7 and can easily scale out on demand. The self-managing features of Oracle Database make it easy for organizations of all sizes to meet their service level objectives, and turn data into a clear business advantage." "Oracle was once again atop the RDBMS software market in 2006," said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Application Development and Deployment, IDC. "Oracle's continued leadership may be in part due to the demand we are seeing for database performance and availability as well as by falling unit prices for storage." Significant Oracle Database Milestones in 2006 2006 marked a year of considerable milestones for Oracle Database 10g. Oracle's free, starter database -- Oracle Database 10g Express Edition -- became generally available in March 2006 and offers application developers, database administrators (DBAs) and students the freedom to develop and deploy applications on their platform of choice. Oracle re-enforced its commitment to offer a wide range of programming interfaces that support the needs of different development communities with the introduction of a variety of new development tools for Microsoft .NET Framework and Oracle Database Web applications. Oracle SQL Developer, a free, database development tool, debuted in March 2006. Designed for Oracle Database developers, Oracle SQL Developer simplifies development cycles and reduces the need to buy third-party tools for developing and debugging SQL and PL/SQL code. Additionally, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2, the database design and Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) tool that helps customers manage the lifecycle of data and metadata from design to deployment and maintenance. The core database design and ETL capabilities of Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 are now included with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One at no additional cost. IDC's report is accessible via the Oracle Web site at: its Web site