This IDC study provides a three-year historical view of the embedded database management system (DBMS) competitive market with vendor shares for 2003?2005.

"As the cost and complexity of managing increase, users will become increasingly interested in business IT solutions that do not add to that complexity," says Carl Olofson, research vice president for Information Management and Data Integration Software. "An alternative is to incorporate applications that manage their own data without requiring DBA involvement or additional operational overhead. This is precisely one of the key value propositions of embedded databases."