Some foundation trusts, meanwhile, are abandoning the standard altogether to buy database software on the open market, with no cost in confidentiality or performance.

The database software maker said the deal would make the market for database software more competitive, not less.

He said it was even more of an issue when people used the spreadsheet package for analysis because they should be using database software and programming languages.

A dictionary program, a relatively cheap piece of database software, finds screen names by combing database tables of common first and last names, or by randomly combining characters.

The market has also seen the emergence of data-warehouse bundles where vendors combine their hardware and database software together as a data warehouse platform.