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SQL Server book demand now double that of Oracle
Most database professionals know that the computer book market is
driven by demands from the industry and nobody know this better than
Tim O'Reilly, founder of the world's most popular computer book
publisher.
Tim downloads data from the point-of-sale database (bookscan) and
loads it into a MySQL data mart for detailed trend analysis:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/state_of_the_computer_book_mar.html
If we assume that people are buying books because of a market
demand, we see Oracle is steep decline and SQL Server book sales up
83%, followed closely by PostgreSQL. We saw this exact same
trend in 1992-1995 when Oracle books started to dominate the
database book market, displacing DB2 and IDMS/R books.
As a whole, the big news is that database book sales are way-down
with the exception of PostgreSQL and SQL Server books, which are up
83% and are now double the size of the Oracle market:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/state_of_the_computer_book_mar_3.html
- The first thing to note is just
how underrated "personal" databases are.
The market for Access books dwarfs the
demand for Oracle books. And even
Filemaker remains a strong database
category.
- The SQL server book market is now
more than twice the size of the Oracle
book market, 50% larger than the MySQL
book market, and growing faster than
either of them.
- In fact, both the Oracle and
MySQL book markets shrank versus the
same period a year ago, with Oracle
feeling more of the pain, off 9% to
MySQL's negative 2%. DB2 is even worse
off, with book sales down 14%.
- A surprise to many may be the
strong growth of PostgreSQL, up 84% over
a year ago. We've also been hearing some
signs of growth in the Postgres market
from our "alpha geek" radar, with
reasons given including better support
for geo data, and better handling of
very large data sets.
Other emerging technologies:
The biggest increases are in the areas of web design and
development (up 25%) and digital media applications (up 14%.)
Books on consumer operating systems are off by 5%, with books on
Windows XP off by a full 17%. Core software development
technologies are up 4%. But even there, the gains are not evenly
distributed. Java, Perl and C++ are down, C#, Python, and Ruby
are up. Red Hat is down, and other Linux distributions are up.
As you might expect, Javascript book sales are up 121%,
driven by the new interest in AJAX. (We don't yet track Ajax as
a separate category, choosing instead to include it with
Javascript.)
As previously noted, ASP is up 60%. With the latest version,
Microsoft has clearly found their stride in the web application
development space. PHP is up only 4%, Cold Fusion up 9%, and JSP
off 16%. Ruby on Rails shows in the treemap as flat, up 0%.
Also, O'Reilly notes a clear seasonal trend for computer book
sales:
As you can see, there's a clear seasonal pattern, with
the graphs for each year closely mirroring the year before,
with remarkably consistent weekly ups and downs.
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