But last month, both the university and the e-learning firm eschewed open-source technology, opting instead to install commercial databases -- albeit free, stripped-down versions, which all of the top database vendors are now offering.

"Everything's so much more solid now," said John Green, president of technology at Toronto-based Savvica. Burgeoning Web traffic was causing the company's MySQL server to crash continually. Also, its e-learning applications are written in Java, which Green felt wasn't well supported by the open-source database.

Instead of adding more MySQL servers, Green decided to roll out three installations of IBM's new DB2 Express-C database. They are managed by a load-balancing application from Xkoto Inc., which is also based in Toronto. "DB2 Express-C just feels like a much more profound piece of software," Green said.

Defections such as Savvica's are heartening to IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp., which in the past six months have all released so-called express databases that are available to users free of charge. In doing so, they have followed the lead of Sybase Inc., which released an express version of its corporate database in September 2004.

The express databases are "significantly challenging the conventional wisdom about commercial vs. open-source databases," said Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah.