Demand for relational database management systems (RDBMS) jumped sharply in 2006, spurred by customer upgrades to multi-core processor licences, accelerated sales in Asia/Pacific and increased take-up among mid-sized companies.

Research recently released by market watcher IDC shows that the RDBMS software market grew 14.7% in 2006 to hit $16.5 billion, a quickening of pace from the 8.3% growth reported for 2005 when sales totalled $14.4 billion.

Predictably, Oracle took the lion’s share of business, holding onto a 44% share of the pie the second year running. Its growth of 14.7% allowed it to bank $7.3 billion in RDBMS revenues.

Trailing Oracle by a large margin, IBM could only muster 11.9% growth; its RDBMS revenues of $3.5 billion gave it a 21% market share. At that rate it will be in danger of being overtaken by Microsoft in 2007. Hot on IBM’s heels, Microsoft grew revenues by 25% to $3.1 billion, giving it a 17% slice of the market.

Among the second tier of suppliers, Sybase managed to lift its revenues by 4.3% to $524 million, although its market share dropped to 3.2%. And data warehousing specialist Teradata took 2.8% of the pie, with revenues rising 8% to $457 million.

Oracle’s success is linked to the increased use of its RDBMS by small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), says IDC, but it has also been helped (somewhat artificially) by the customer having to upgrade their Oracle licences when they have installed new servers powered by multi-core processors.

Microsoft’s rapid growth is more straight-forward: increased acceptance of its SQL Server 2005 product as an enterprise RDBMS.

The outlook for the market looks fairly stable for the moment, with the key players able to exploit the new markets in the Asia/Pacific region, while mining the growing opportunity among SMBs.

However, IDC warns that “technology innovations are afoot that could disrupt this process, [although] the impact of such innovation is only very subtle at the moment.”