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CEO Larry Ellison's databases have been selling well, spurring increases in profits and net income.

Of the four purchases made by Oracle this year, the $10.6 billion USD acquisition of PeopleSoft was the biggest. And it seems to have paid off for the company.

Sales of databases and business applications have maneuvered Oracle into better position to compete with SAP, the market leader in back-end business software.

Fourth quarter profit rose 3.2 percent to 20 cents per share, or $1.02 billion. Those figures were 19 cents and $990 million a year ago, according to an Oracle press release. Sales rose to $3.88 billion, a profit of 26 cents per share.

Oracle no longer leads the database market. IBM and its DB2 occupy that place. But Mr. Ellison sees Oracle coming back.

"Oracle's database business delivered another strong growth quarter," said Mr. Ellison. "The latest Gartner, IDC and Morgan Stanley database surveys all agree that Oracle is increasing database market share while IBM's DB2 database is in decline."

The numbers seem to bear out Mr. Ellison's enthusiasm. New software license sales rose to $1.61 billion, over the $1.5 billion average estimated by analysts according to a Bloomberg report. Those sales impact the future earnings of the company.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.