IDC have just released their RDBMS Vendor Share for 2006. (sorry – you need to be an IDC client or shell out some money to get the report). As you would imagine the numbers are pretty big. The revenue leader with 44% is Oracle and that amounts to a stunning $7.3b (which probably doesn’t include some of the peripheral tooling and doesn’t include support and services revenue).

MySQL aren’t in the report (not a mention) because IDC vendor share reports are based purely on license revenue and MySQL’s revenue would have been too small to make the list; let alone the amount attributed to pure license revenue. On the whole IDC reports contain great data but I’ve long wished that they would catch up with the rest of the world and recognize the importance of footprint / installed base growth rather than pure revenue growth – anyone reading IDC reports might think the FOSS movement had never happened.

OK, back to RDBMS. The interesting thing to note, is that Oracle attributed a lot of their growth to the SMB segment and Microsoft reported the best growth (25% from 2005-2006). These two data points suggest that the demand for RDBMs in smaller businesses is pretty hot right now – and that should be great news for Sun / MySQL.