Market Adoption of MS SQL Server 2005 on the Rise

Survey reveals widespread use of MS SQL Server for running business intelligence, reporting and data warehousing applications.

GoldenGate Software Inc., a leading provider of transactional data management solutions, recently announced the results of a September 2006 survey, “SQL Server and Microsoft Technologies Reach across the Enterprise,” produced by Unisphere Research in cooperation with GoldenGate Software and the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS). The key findings, announced at the 2006 PASS Community Summit in Seattle, point to the growing adoption of MS SQL Server 2005, as well as increasing reliance on MS SQL Server for supporting mission-critical applications.

The survey was designed to assess enterprise adoption levels for SQL Server, examine the types of applications organizations run today, and understand the plans for new applications in the coming year. Overall, 95% of respondents either run SQL Server 2005 today or plan to adopt the database platform within 2 years, citing performance, enhanced reporting, and extended business intelligence capabilities as the top drivers. More than 7 out of 10 respondents (71%) said the number of applications running within their SQL Server environments will increase over the coming year. According to respondents, the predominant types of applications running within their SQL Server environments are reporting functions, business intelligence and data warehousing, with more than a third (34%) identifying business intelligence or analytics as their top project priority this year. In terms of maintaining continuous operations, at least half of all survey respondents need to take their environment offline for upgrades, migrations and other maintenance tasks and most of this planned downtime is for up to four hours per episode.

“With new confidence in the database platform’s ability to run mission-critical applications for business intelligence and enterprise analytics, the survey findings reflect the rapid adoption of SQL Server in existing heterogeneous environments – with 85% of respondents reporting wide use of commercial and open source databases running alongside SQL Server,” said Sami Akbay, vice president of marketing at GoldenGate Software. “Enterprise applications and data warehouses no longer run in isolation, and therefore organizations must be able to easily move their transactional data across systems and at the same time minimize the risk of any downtime or outage. We see an increasing need to integrate data transactions in real time from other environments to MS SQL Server in order to give the business access to the most up to date, accurate information.”

GoldenGate provides high availability and real-time data integration solutions with support for the widest range of databases including Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server 2005, Oracle, Sybase, DB2 UDB, HP NonStop Enscribe and MySQL.