Oracle, IBM losing ground to local databases in China, says IDC

Beijing's efforts to grow local alternatives to the wares of the world's mightiest tech companies have made progress in the relational database market, according to research by analyst firm International Data Corp (IDC). Under what IDC referred to as "favorable policies," the relational database market share of local Chinese …

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, for most purposes you can switch to PostgreSQL from Oracle, and I've been a Oracle DBA for over 25 years and even I'm looking for better/cheaper DBs than Oracle. As it was 20 years ago, most apps are still being written in a comically generic fashion that you can practically swap in any RDBMS you like, a little tweaking and you it'll be fit for purpose. Unless you have a ton of oddball calls to specific RDBMS features, take you business elsewhere and save your cash 'cos Larry doesn't need a another island or multi-million dollar racing yacht!

[Charlie Clark]

Fairly meaningless

Without more information about the database systems the report is fairly meaningless. There are lots of reasons not to use Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, etc. if you are not a legacy user. Licences are expensive and restrictive and quite often an open source system like Postgres provides all you need with the option of extending it, which might well make sense for better support say of the Chinese character set. No doubt some of the Chinese systems are based on existing open source databases as writing a new RDBMS from scratch is far from easy. Would be nice to know more about the Chinese systems.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Fairly meaningless

It would surely be rather surprising if they weren't simply a commercial support offering around an existing system, or at least were to begin with. Nothing wrong with that; it's what Red Hat did until they became so successful that IBM felt it necessary to screw buy them up.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Fairly meaningless

I can imagine that there would be a market for some of the more specifically Chinese features so presumbaly there's something there with columnar storage for real time analysis. And they may well have advanced natural language features attuned to their character sets, etc. But, I agree, there is also nothing wrong with companies providing commercial support for an open source database of choice.

Though it would be nice to see any possible extensions released as open source at some point.

[Anonymous Coward]

No major loss for oracle. They do very little business in China. They have no development in China or very little. To my knowledge they don't have access to the source code.

Contrary to other posts here it is not a simple endeavor to swap an rdbms. Yes it can be done but it's intensive and you also need to consider communications with other databases as just one of many factors.