FRAMINGHAM, USA: The year 2007 saw continued steady growth in the relational database management systems (RDBMS) market, with signal improvements on the part of several of the top five vendors in this space. The RDBMS market is estimated to have grown by 12.6 percent from $16.7 billion in 2006 to $18.8 billion in 2007.

The top five vendors for the worldwide RDBMS market are Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Teradata and Sybase. All have put an increased emphasis on performance and manageability, as well as greater flexibility and utility of such features as standby databases. Oracle once again led the RDBMS market and increased its market share in 2007.

"Although the top 5 RDBMS vendors represent over 90 percent of the worldwide market, there is plenty of dynamism and growth potential in the remaining 10 percent, where differentiators that include low-cost, extraordinarily high throughput, embedability, and unusual architectures are aimed at niche data management requirements," said Carl Olofson, research vice president of Information Management and Data Integration Software research at IDC. "These vendors certainly bear watching as time goes by."

Additional key findings include:

* For the top five RDBMS vendors, 2007 was characterized by growth through features that offer greater flexibility and manageability in deployment and growing competition for the mid-market segment.

* Large RDBMS vendors are continuing to seek to broaden their range of addressable opportunities by acquiring smaller niche DBMS technology vendors.

* Technology enhancements in areas such as compression, security, and unstructured data support are forming new battlegrounds for the RDBMS vendors.

* Data warehousing and strategic data management initiatives such as master data management (MDM) continue to help drive RDBMS sales.