Morgan Stanley & Co’s US Investment Research group canvassed 102 users on-line on their enterprise software spending plans for 1996 and 1997. On average, 53.9% of respondents’ production applications access a relational database, although 70% of data still resides on mainframes. The users said just over a third of their current legacy applications would be converted for relational databases over the next two years. The average size of a production relational database is currently 16.8Gb, up from 9Gb found in the same survey last year. The dominant operating system for developing client-server applications is Unix, and while Windows NT will gain some ground through 1997, users still expect Unix to be their primary development environment by a large margin. Oracle dominates respondents’ development relational database choice, followed by Sybase, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server and DB2. Microsoft Corp is expected to get some share by the end of next year, putting it ahead of Informix Corp and Computer Associates International Inc with Ingres, but staying some way behind Oracle Corp and Sybase Corp.
