News.com has an article which highlights that both IDC and Gartner feel that the biggest threat to Oracle is from Open Source alternatives, Here are some expcerpts from the article.The biggest threat to Oracle's dominance of the market could be open-source competitors like MySQL, analysts said. Acceptance of open-source software could change the way pricing and licensing is determined for RDBMS products, upsetting the status quo.

"These open-source (database management system) products continue to improve in terms of functionality and scalability, and DBMS tool vendors are beginning to provide support for these offerings," Colleen Graham, a Gartner principal analyst, said in a statement.

But Oracle maintains the open-source challenge is not a problem.

"IDC did not call out the open-source vendor numbers specifically, and Gartner rated all of them together as coming in at less than 1 percent of the market. So it's not a significant amount overall. I don't think they even rate a mention," Willie Hardie, vice president of database product marketing for Oracle, told CNET News.com.

"We think it is a big deal. Granted, in the DBS market right now, they are very small players. Remember about 10 years ago, Linux in the market was a very small player? Not so much, anymore," Gartner's Graham told CNET News.com.

Gartner reported that Linux, driven mainly by Oracle, was the fastest-growing operating system platform for RDBMS. It rose 84 percent, outperforming Unix.

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Prashanth Rai