Oracle Corp is brandishing new figures from Dataquest Inc that show it topping Microsoft Corp’s SQL Server market share for NT systems. In 1997, says Dataquest, Oracle managed a 41.5% share of the database market on NT, compared with Microsoft’s second place position of 38.8%. The NT sector, driven by booming sales of NT servers, was far and away the strongest growth area for the database market, with a 1997 sales increase of 91%. Oracle’s share of the overall database market share also finally overtook IBM’s OS/400 version of DB2, the market leader in 1996. Oracle now has a 27.5% market share, up from 24.9% last year, while IBM’s share remained flat at 27.2%. Microsoft was third with a 14.9% market share.
