Today Quest Software announced it topped the IDC charts for top provider of database development and optimization software for the third year in a row. According to IDC, the key to the company’s success lies in its database development and SQL authoring and optimization tools that are collected under its line of Toad products.

As the proclaimed market leader, Quest is positioned to grow if IDC’s estimates that worldwide revenue in 2010 turn out to be correct. The research group says that the ecosystem around database development and management tools will top $2 billion. Instead of sitting by as the NoSQL and Hadoop parade passes, Quest Software has made it a goal over the last year to integrate the big data analysis and management potential of these frameworks with the familiarity of SQL-based interfaces and tools.

At the head of the line in terms of offerings is Quest’s Toad for Oracle, which is widely used for Oracle development and has a stable history of 15 years of continued development and refining behind it. However, other products that are combining the two major trends over the last couple of years—big data and cloud—are helping Quest maintain an edge as the swift process of database evolution carries on.

For instance, this year at Hadoop World in New York, Quest Software touted its ability to help companies ease into the big data era without bumping up against the qualified staffing and talent shortages (to tackle Hadoop, cloud, NoSQL, etc.) via its Toad data management toolkit, this time aimed at cloud databases.

They claimed that this would address the talent shortage head-on by “empowering database professionals to directly apply their existing skills to emerging big data systems through an easy-to-use and familiar SQL-based interface for managing non-relational data.”

To shed a little light on this, Quest Software’s Director of R&D and its NoSQL expert discuss the success of Hadoop in the NoSQL market and how relational databases can be deployed to better work within the Hadoop framework.

The Toad for Cloud Databases offering, which appeared in beta back in summer 2010, made Quest more attractive to users by providing this SQL-based database management tool to support emerging, non-relational platforms. They have continued development on Toad, supporting new platforms and tools (Hive, HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB, and others) and creating a bi-directional data connector between Oracle and Hadoop.

While the term 'cloud databases' is in the product name, the toolkit is intended for a variety of non-relational databases in both cloud and on-premises settings, John Whittaker, senior manager of product marketing says. "It's for big data, NoSQL, non-relational databases, which are commonly called 'cloud databases' in the industry," he explains. "We look at them as cloud databases because they were born out of the likes of Yahoo and Google." However, he adds, "this technology doesn't have to live in the cloud. It can be in a variety of places."

According to Carl Olofson, IDC’s Research VP of Application Development and Deployment, “Quest is considered a major vendor in multiple database management and development market segments, but continues to be particularly aggressive in the development and optimization segment due largely to its popular Toad product line. Database tool providers are presented with new opportunity as the market continues to grow, based on a skill shortage caused by a growing number of diverse database technologies, and also the constant demand for applications that are built with efficiency and security in mind."

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