EnterpriseDB is "attempting to break the oligopoly" that exists in the enterprise database market, president and CEO Andy Astor told me during his visit to Australia last week.

Between them, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have 87 percent of the market, and therefore have "no motivation to lower their prices" because of the high barriers to entry by new players. But "the market acceptability of open source software has changed that equation."

EnterpriseDB has taken the open source PostgresSQL, and added Oracle compatibility, a suite of tools, and round-the-clock support from centres in New Jersey, London and Islamabad. "Our goal was to exploit open source to allow us to enter the market, and exploit compatibility to let customers move to this technology," explains Astor.

What this means is that customers can adopt EnterpriseDB for serious work that needs more than MySQL can offer, with the safety blanket of being able to move to Oracle with minimum effort if that should prove necessary. At the same time, existing applications that use Oracle can easily be moved to EnterpriseDB as a money-saving measure.

For example, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) first used EnterpriseDB to power its user forums, but now plans to put it to work as the database behind its massively multiplayer online games in place of Oracle. It's also starting to use EnterpriseDB for internal applications.

Eighty percent of SOE's applications ran on EnterpriseDB without modification, and the company expects to save $US1 million per year compared with the cost of using Oracle.

Then there's Vonage, which previously used MySQL for smaller applications and Oracle for the larger ones. But as the company has grown, so has the amount of data. EnterpriseDB allows it to boost the tasks that have outgrown MySQL without facing Oracle's price tag, with potential to reduce the infrastructure costs for some of the applications currently on Oracle.

"Oracle compatibility is our hook," says Astor, pointing out that around half of his 100 or so customers are Oracle sites, and that EnterpriseDB typically saves them between 70 and 80 percent of the cost of using Oracle.

Forestalling charges that EnterpriseDB is leeching on the PostgresSQL project, Astor notes "we have more people contributing back into the PostgresSQL community than anyone else in the world." The company employs some of the leading PostgresSQL figures and also funds some PostgresSQL-related work.

Sounds like a pretty convincing story to me.