Office applications Toolkit

Story: MySQL and Firebird battle for database top spot

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The results do not really surprise me now I have had time to consider it. MySQL is not really aimed at the same market as FB and PG. Lack of ACID compliancy, and for a long time lack of stored procedures and triggers made it too primative to be used with mission critical data. It does plug really nicely into LAMP, so I do see a great future for MySQL. There are also some licensing rules that affect how developers can bundle MySQL.

PostgreSQL until recently had no windows build. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to work out that this is going to limit its market. Many small businesses do not have a linux box. Some would argue windows isn't the best environment for a dbms, I am not going down that path though. The latest version has some features that FB lacks, so I expect PG to increase its market share now Windows software developers can realistically use it.

Contrary to some peoples belief, Firebird was a popular dbms well before Mozilla named their project. It is a bit of a shame really, because now people question the motives of FBs reaction. To be honest, Firefox didn't exactly suffer as a result of the name clash either. FB has a tiny footprint (3MB), yet is surprisingly powerful. It shares a lot with its ancestor (Interbase) particularily with respect to ease of integration into the Borland tools.

Both FB and PG are serious threats to SQL Server and Oracle. I imagine that the big boys will always be around, but their marketability will shift from superior product through to legal indemnification for IP. I don't include MySQL in this list because it is a different market, although if MySQL introduces ACID compliancy, it may still be a three horse race.

I think it is great that there is not just an open source alternative, but several open source alternatives that we can judge on technical merit rather than simple licensing style.

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