This IDC study contains a five-year forecast for the worldwide relational database management system (RDBMS) software market, including software revenue figures for that market by operating environment and geographic region for the historical year 2005 and the forecast years 2006-2010.

"The worldwide RDBMS software market is expected to continue to grow modestly through the next five-year period," says Carl Olofson, research vice president for Information Management and Data Integration Software research at IDC. "Despite the belief of some that RDBMS technology has become a commodity, there is still enough differentiation among the vendors' products that has meaning to customers to ensure ongoing growth and technology-based competition during the forecast period."