The largest segment of Oracle shops (41 percent) use Oracle Development Suite to develop applications. But two environments are gaining ground: Oracle Application Express, formerly HTML DB, which has grown 'from zero to 12 percent' in one year, Kaplan said, and Microsoft Visual Studio, which is used by a fifth of survey respondents. IBM WebSphere and the open-source Eclipse toolkit are also gaining popularity, while older toolkits such as PowerBuilder, ColdFusion, Borland and NetBeans are losing steam.

The SQL and PL/SQL languages are each still used by about three-quarters of respondents. Java is used by about four in 10 respondents, followed by Perl, Visual Basic and C/C++.

PeopleSoft (23 percent), Oracle (20 percent) and SAP (19 percent) are the most popular enterprise application suites for Oracle database users. Open-source ERP and CRM systems (16 percent) and custom-developed systems (12 percent) are catching up, though, the survey showed.