Microsoft's SQL Server keeps showing up in unexpected places. One of them is the list of entrants for Winter Corp.'s 2005 TopTen largest databases.No SQL Server systems actually made it into the top ten of the list last year. But that's not the point. Few SQL Server systems have shown up among the entrants in the past. That changed last year, according to SQL Server-specific data requested from sources at Winter Corp.

Out of 170 entrants qualifying as managing a terabyte of data or more, 43 were SQL Server systems.

That's contrary to some of the one-liners and stories told by Microsoft's competitors about SQL Server. It's great for small applications at small and medium-sized businesses, they say, but it's not ready for the big time. But the fact is, there's no reason why a Microsoft relational database can't function as one of the largest in the world. So NCR Teradata, IBM DB2, Oracle, and Sybase, welcome a new member to the club.

All in all, there were 60 databases running under Windows on the 2005 entry list, or 35% of the total. Forty-three of them were SQL Server. Since Oracle is competing keenly with SQL Server for the Windows market, many of those remaining 17 Windows systems were probably Oracle.

Unix-based systems, primarily Oracle and IBM's DB2, constituted the largest group, 51% of the entrant list. But Linux showed up with 7%, just ahead of the IBM mainframe's ZOS with 6%.

So SQL Server, representing a quarter of the systems on the entry list, is beginning to run with the big dogs ... because it's grown into a big-dog role.