SQL Server leads OLAP market
ENT News | at | by Mike
SQL Server consolidated its No. 1 position in the 2002 worldwide OLAP market, where Microsoft's presence continues to drive down the value of the average sale. But even so, Redmond is not enjoying the kind of market dominance it has achieved in other markets, according to preliminary estimates for 2002 from the U.K.-based OLAP Report.
Microsoft entered the OLAP market in early 1999 with the release of SQL Server 7.0, which rocked the market for on-line analytic processing, also known as multi-dimensional databases. Because Microsoft chose to bundle OLAP services for free with the SQL Server relational database, Microsoft effectively undercut the market for OLAP products, which had previously sold for tens of thousands of dollars each.