The Forrester study has the market giants IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with 88% of the share in enterprise databases. They found their lead to be due mainly to high performance, availability and scalability.

Second place finishers were cost beneficial offerings from Computer Associates, Software AG and Sybase. Current competition also comes from IBM Informatix and open source products Ingres and MySQL, which Forrester considers appropriate for the small to medium size enterprise market.

The U.S. marketing firm praises Ingres as the open source database with the best enterprise features, even when it isn't the best known. Its optimal deployment is for less than 1 TByte databases with maximum a thousand concurrent users. Unfortunately only a few ready-made applications have Ingres.

The study has MySQL with open-minded features, even compared to the proprietary products. Forrester also points to its large user community. MySQL works best for databases up to 1 TByte. Many applications support the open source database, although some important ones such as Peoplesoft, SAP and Siebel still do not.

In comparison, PostgreSQL might have the largest developer community, but has hardly any distribution among vendors. In Forrester's view it lacks the availability, security and performance qualities of enterprise class databases.

The market firm based their study on 150 criteria and a sample of 21 manufacturers and corporate clients. The study is available as a free 25-page PDF after registration at Ingres. Forrester Research claims that the study is independent of, and was not commissioned by, Ingres.