With a 41.3 percent market share of the global relational database management systems market, Oracle led the market's robust recovery in 2004, IDC said.
The overall market grew by 11.6 percent, IDC reported, although the growth was tempered somewhat by currency exchange rates and pricing pressures.
"There is no question that the overall trend is favourable -- companies are clearly spending again to meet their backlog of database management requirements," said Carl Olofson, research director of IDC's Information Management and Data Integration Software service, in a statement.
IDC pointed to the middle RDMS market as a coming battleground as Oracle and IBM move to beef-up their offerings in that area, which is currently dominated by Microsoft.
The software giant accounts for just 13.4 percent of the global RDMS market currently but it is aiming to increase that percentage with its SQL Server 2005, scheduled for release later this year.
Rounding out the global market share numbers are IBM, which accounts for 30.6 percent of the market, and number four and five players Sybase and NCR Teradata, each with 3.1 percent, according to IDC.
The market research firm said that the business of all five RDMS firms expanded last year.
IDC noted there could be threats to the established RDMS providers coming this year from open source software providers.
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