Back in the 1980s, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) won the mega fight for the database market. And the firm's dominance has been fairly steady since.

But might things be changing? Perhaps so. After all, there are a variety of robust open source alternatives such as MySQL AB. In fact, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) recently spent $1 billion for the company.

There is also another sturdy player: EnterpriseDB. In fact, this week the company snagged $10 million in venture capital. The investors include Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, Valhalla Partners and even IBM (NYSE: IBM). Keep in mind that IBM rarely invests in venture deals. Although, it's been a big supporter of open source, such as with Linux, Apache, and Eclipse.

EnterpriseDB's solutions are based on PostgreSQL, which is a top-notch open source database (under development for more than 15 years). "MySQL is good for quick and dirty databases," said Andy Astor, the CEO of EnterpriseDB, in an interview with me. "But EnterpriseDB goes beyond this and offers intensive transaction processing, scalability and other important capabilities." Interestingly enough, EnterpriseDB has a powerful feature to provide compatibility with Oracle databases.

Astor admits it's not easy getting customers (especially in light of the intense competition). But so far, EnterpriseDB has about 225 paying customers. "Open source is an unstoppable force," said Astor.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

EnterpriseDB: Wants some of Oracle's lunch originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.