Oracle Corp’s senior vice-president of server technologies Jerry Held says he believes the relational database market can only sustain two or three major players and that long-term, Informix Software Inc and Sybase Inc will be left slugging it out for fourth position behind Microsoft Corp SQL Server and IBM Corp DB2 by the end of the century. Oracle has more developers than it [Informix] has employees. Sybase is already dead, he reckons, with both companies still swallowing their respective Illustra Technologies Corp and Powersoft Corp acquisitions. Meantime, Held confirmed that the company’s next generation Oracle8 object-relational database will go into production in the first half of next year. It goes into beta test next month. Oracle7 7.3 is the last major release before Oracle8. The Sedona application development environment and repository will include Visual Edge Technology Ltd’s ObjectBridge bi-directional object translation facility and facilities for managing applications from disparate sources. It will ship around the same time as Oracle8.
