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On page 8 of this issue of "SD Times" magazine: http://www.sdtimes.com/download/images/sdtimes179.pdf is an article titled, "SQL Server Still No. 1 in Databases," which publishes the results of a survey of software development managers. It includes a chart titled, "Which were the top factors that led to the decision to use the database in your current project?" It is interesting to note that all but one of the items cited among the top 10 reasons for choosing a database are non-technical: 45.9% Familiarity with database 21.3% High availability or reliability features 20.1% Lowest development costs 18.6% Lowest deployment costs 17.1% Covered under site license 15.3% Reputation of vendor 15.3% Required by specific applications 14.5% Required by customer/partner 14.5% Our legacy applications required it 12.3% Integration with app server (I consider "High availability or reliability features" to be the one technical item above.) So the top factor is "Familiarity with database," showing the impact simple popularity has on database choice. On top of that, the top 5 includes "Lowest development costs," which I'd interpret as also including the cost of finding and hiring developers that know the product, and "Lowest deployment costs," which again indicates the value placed on using an already widely deployed product. You have to dig deeper in the list to start finding technical reasons for choosing a database: #13 Had best database administration tools, #17 Integration with IDE, #18 Had best development tools. And really deep to start finding traditional core database technical abilities cited as the reason: #20 Lowest hardware requirements, #21 Had highest transaction performance, #23 Smaller databases lacked performance, #24 Smaller databases lacked key features, #31 Lowest memory footprint requirements. Each of these were cited by 8% or fewer respondents. In contrast to what you often hear mentioned as a reason for choosing an open source database over a "big" enterprise database, 'Larger databases seemed like "overkill"' was only cited by 6.5% of respondents. Perhaps this is an indication of the types of users they surveyed. The breakdown on usage for the various databases databases, according to the article (adds up to more than 100% as respondents apparently could choose multiple products): 74.7% SQL Server (down 1.7% from 76.4% a year ago) 54.5% Oracle (up 3.2%) 54.4% Microsoft Access (down 1.7%) 43.4% MySQL (up 4.9%) 23.5% IBM DB2 (up 3.1%) 11.2% PostgreSQL (down 0.4%) To sift out the effect of legacy usage, the survey also asked "which databases were used for the most recently completed project." The results for that were: 51.0% SQL Server 37.1% Oracle 20.7% MySQL 14.9% Access 12.5% DB2 4.2% PostgreSQL This BZ Research study seem to be in contradiction of a Gartner study the same magazine referenced in the previous issue (page 43): http://www.sdtimes.com/download/images/sdtimes178.pdf where a chart shows for 2006: 47.1% Oracle 21.1% IBM 17.4% Microsoft 7.9% Others 3.2% Sybase 3.2% Teradata Though this is measuring market share, which isn't the same thing as usage. Apparently all the open source offerings are lumped into "Others," if they're counted at all. Sometimes market share is measured strictly by sales revenue, which will obviously vastly under report open source usage. (This was just a small side-bar, and it doesn't mention how Gartner arrived at these figures. This is one of those typical teasers used to sell market reports by market research companies.) If all of this talk of closed source databases topping the popularity charts got you down, there's always this other survey to consider: http://www.sdtimes.com/article/LatestNews-20070801-19.html Survey: Developers Targeting Windows Less Often Surveys published by Evans Data over the past two years have concluded that there is an accelerating trend of developers abandoning Windows clients as target platforms, and Evans forecasts that the trend will continue in favor of developing for embedded platforms and Linux. ...development specifically for the Windows operating system has declined by 12 percent from one year ago, continuing a two-year slide. The survey found that the number of developers writing specifically for Linux had increased 34 percent, from 8.8 percent of respondents a year ago to 11.8 percent today. The data also shows that there was corresponding growth in development for embedded operating systems. ... Evans found that Windows use by developers themselves has remained steady. ... Microsoft declined to comment on the Evans survey. It is a client of Evans? and a member of its advisory board. ... Other findings from the survey show that JavaScript is the most widely used scripting language, eclipsing PHP, Python and Ruby. However, Ruby usage is expected to increase by half over a year?s time. Additionally, a third of North American developers are working with virtualization, and its adoption is expected to increase by 42.5 percent within a year. -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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