A few days ago Kevin Closson (keep an eye on this new blog and expect to find something interesting there) mentioned that Oracle 8.1.7 is one of the most mature releases (at least I understood it this way). I agree with him that many people still use it but how many? Google Trend is our friend - enter “oracle 8i, oracle 9i, oracle 10g” and take in the popularity trends:

It looks like Oracle 10g became dominant somewhere in the 2005 Q3. Unfortunately, trends are only available since 2004, and there is no data on when 9i took over 8i. I find it interesting that the popularity of 8i is decreasing at about the same pace as 9i.

Now, note that this is the trend of search keywords including Oracle 8i. But hey, assuming that 8.1.7 is the most stable release, people wouldn’t search too much about it. If that’s the case, then we should multiply this trend by something to estimate number of 8i environments. Maybe by two?

How would you interpret this graph?

Another interesting observation - click on the “Regions” tab under the popularity graph:

Is anyone running Oracle in North America or Europe?