On the relative importance of MySQL

Since the announcement of Sun buying MySQL recently we (Sun) of course had a lot of conversations with customers, partners and Sun internally about the value and position of MySQL.

To show the relevance of MySQL I searched for a couple of database products (or their names) on some job portals (jobfinder.at, jobfinder.de, stepstone.de, monster.at, monster.de, monster.co.uk), the (not new) idea being, that the number of job postings does correlate to the importance of a platform or system.

I know that this is not representative... but it gives a nice overview. And the ranking of the databases on the various job portals is consistent. (All figures rounded, and those 5 were the only ones I looked for... so it is strictly not percentage of the DB market but it gives you the relative positioning)

So:

#1	Oracle (to be expected)	50%
#2	SQL Server	29%
#3	MySQL (!!)	13%
#4	DB2	6%
#5	postgresql	1%

I did the same on amazon.com on books which gives a similar, but not identical picture:

#1	Oracle (again)	85%
#2	SQL Server	6%
#3	DB2	6%
#4	MySQL	3%
#5	postgresql	1%

Not really surprising that DB2 ranks before MySQL here... What does surprise me is that almost all books seem to be on Oracle.

Also of course there is a skew towards Oracle, since I only search (literally) for “Oracle” so the results might contain jobs and books about Oracle applications or (in case of books, not jobs I guess) the Oracle of Delphi, or other totally unrelated Oracles ... see the Wikipedia disambiguation page for a list of oracular things in this world.

Anyway: the results to me are clear:

MySQL has more importance than DB2 today (this of course kind of hurts me, me being an old DB2 fan) and is not that far off from SQL-Server... half of its “value” in both book and job search.