Forrester Research has named Microsoft a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Database Management Systems, Q2 2009. (June 2009). Forrester writes that Microsoft is “The most aggressive DBMS vendor with a strong road map.” In this Wave, Forrester categorizes Leaders as offering “broad set of functionality to support any critical transactional application.”

Analyst Noel Yuhanna acknowledges that Microsoft “over the past three years has shown increasing focus and commitment to going after the enterprise market.” And that SQL Server 2008 has “enabled Microsoft to take market share in moderately sized to large enterprises, delivering good performance, scalability, security, and availability functionality.” The report continues on to say that “Five years ago, hardly any enterprises ran multi-terabyte databases with SQL Server to support critical applications. Today, hundreds of enterprises are running 10-terabyte and larger transactional SQL Server databases.”

Key findings in the report include:

• Microsoft has done extremely well with its overall current offering, with high scores in database programmability, security, availability, and application/data integration.
• SQL Server is known for its easy-to-use, simplified enterprise DBMS and for delivering the best price-performance for most business applications. Many enterprises like the breadth and depth of the packaged applications SQL Server supports across various industries.
• Although SQL Server lags in distributed caching and scale-out architectures, Microsoft is adding such features in future releases. For example, “Velocity” is a distributed caching technology that supports high-volume transactions.

Read the full Forrester Research report: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/docs/06-30-09EnterpriseDatabaseManagementSystems.aspx.