New license revenue of $7.1bn was up 5.1% from 2002, following a decline of 6.6% from 2001. Growth was achieved thanks to companies looking for reporting and data management capabilities to meet regulatory compliance requirements, according to Colleen Graham, Gartner principle analyst, although it also noted the role of the weak dollar in boosting revenue from outside the US.

IBM retained the hotly contested number-one position it grabbed from Oracle in 2002 when Oracle suffered a 20.5% decline in relational database management revenue. Although Oracle recovered with 2.4% growth in 2003 to $2.3bn giving it 32.6% market share, IBM enjoyed revenue up 4.9% at $2.5bn and 35.7% market share.

IBM’s revenue growth was achieved thanks to strong growth for DB2 on its own iSeries and zSeries platforms, according to Gartner, prompting Oracle to try to claim some kind of victory by claiming market share lead on what it called the modern relational database market, that is to say Unix, Windows and Linux.

Although representing less than 5% of the database market by revenue, Linux was by far the fastest growing platform for relational databases in 2003, with new license revenue totaling $299.3m, up 158% on 2002. Oracle can certainly claim a victory on Linux with revenue up 360.8% to claim 69.1% of the market. IBM trailed Oracle with 28.5% of the market share for relational databases on Linux, down from 57.6% in 2002.

Oracle can also claim 57.4% of the market for relational databases on the Unix operating system, although this platform continues to decline, down 5.9% in 2003. The market for relational databases on Microsoft Corp’s Windows showed a slight improvement, with new license revenue up 3.8% at $2.8bn.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft dominates this segment of the database market with 47.3% share, up from 44.3% in 2002. Microsoft also enjoyed the fastest growth of all RDBMS vendors in 2003, with revenue up 11.1% at $1.3bn, giving it 18.7% market share.

NCR Corp’s Teradata data warehousing division was the only other vendor to get a mention from Gartner, with revenue up 6.0% at $195m, giving it 2.8% market share. Other vendors made up the remaining 10.3% of the market, worth $727m.