Oracle had 48.8% of the market in 2011, according to Gartner. That was up from 48.2% in 2010. IBM with its DB2 database and Microsoft with its SQL Server databases were 20.2% and 17%, respectively. Thanks to Colleen Graham, a research director at Gartner, I have the rundown:

As you can see, Oracle’s growth was the largest in terms of raw dollars, and second largest in terms of percentage. The largest percentage growth went to SAP/Sybase, which already has Sybase databases and is trying to ramp up its database business further with the SAP HANA in-memory appliance. But its percentage growth is largely because it was starting from a smaller base. Can SAP really be the #2 database vendor by 2015, as it hopes to be? For that to happen, it would have to at least quadruple its database business in the next four years.

Oracle’s announcement of Exalytics, an in-memory business analytics server, brings it more in line opposite the in-memory appliance SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytics Appliance), Gorbachev said this week.

“I think there was something missing before for the Oracle BI customer,” he said. “To have a complete end-to-end solution for a data warehouse they would still need to install something. Now they can have a pre-installed OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) stack. This is now probably something that you could put up against SAP HANA.”

Oracle consultancy Pythian this week won the North American Titan Award from the Oracle partner network for its help in implementing Exadata at LinkShare, a marketing company in New York. Company officials also told me this week what it will do for potential customers who buy an Oracle database appliance through Pythian.

“We will migrate anybody’s database from any version on any hardware to a new database appliance for free,” said Executive Chairman and Founder Paul Vallèe. “The benefit for us is we get to demonstrate our expertise to a new account. The customer for us is more meaningful than a single upgrade.”