Open source databases are showing the highest growth rate in the database market, according to a new study by analyst firm Gartner.
"The combined category of open source database management systems [DBMS] vendors, which includes MySQL and Ingres, showed the strongest growth, although it was one of the smallest revenue bases, " said Colleen Graham, a principal analyst at Gartner.
"These open source DBMS products continue to improve in functionality and scalability, and DBMS tool vendors are beginning to provide support for these offerings."
Industry analysts typically track application adoption by licence revenues, which clouds the view on adoption rates for software that can be downloaded from the internet free of charge.
But Gartner has started to define the market by updates and services as well as licence revenues.
Overall revenues in the database market grew by 8.3 per cent last year to $13.8bn, according to the research.
Oracle remained the largest vendor with a 48.9 per cent market share, followed by IBM at 22 per cent.
Microsoft displayed the highest growth rate of the major vendors. Sales of its SQL Server 2005 database increased by 16.6 per cent and pushed Microsoft's overall market share to 15 per cent.
