Dual CPU Database Server Comparison

A gigantic market

For those of you who are relatively new to databases, I will be providing some information for you shortly and comparing it to the more popular, but much smaller, gaming market.

Database software sales continue to be a barometer of the overall IT market health. Database servers are, without any doubt, a critical part - the beating software heart - of many companies.

The market of relational database software was worth $7.1 billion in 2003 according to research firm, Gartner. Up to $46 billion is spent in the Servers (hardware) market, and while a small portion of those servers is used for other things than running relational databases (about 20% for HPC applications), the lion's share of those servers are bought to ensure that a DB2, Oracle, MS SQL server or MySQL database can perform its SQL duties well. So, in essence, IT people are spending over $50 billion on databases and servers.

According to a very recent report, about $15.8 billion of the $46 billion server market is spent on PC servers. AMD's Opteron has conquered about 5.3 percent of this PC server market, but the remaining 94.7 percent belongs to Intel's Xeon.

For comparison, the total PC gaming software and hardware market is about $1.3 billion (according to IDC), while the complete gaming market is worth $3.4 billion.

At about 36 percent, the DB2 database is the number one database. Since it is available on many operating systems, and both x86 and 64 bit x86 archtitectures are supported, it received our special attention.

MySQL is, by far, the most popular relational database in the low end of this market and is steadily growing in features and market share, taking away market share from the big players.