Oracle, IBM, Microsoft Challenged by Free Database Software
This article is for subscribers only.
Oracle Corp., which supplies Yahoo! Inc. with database software, may lose some of that business to a little-known competing product -- the free MySQL database.
MySQL and others are starting to eat into the $8.8 billion market for database software dominated by Oracle, International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp., users said. Yahoo, which uses MySQL to run the Yahoo! Finance Web site, may replace some Oracle databases with MySQL, said Jeremy Zawodny, a computer engineer at the Internet company.