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.