The 10 Most Popular DB Engines (SQL and NoSQL) in 2015

About two years ago, we’ve published this post about the 10 most popular DB engines, where we analyzed the data published by Solid IT on their DB Ranking website.

In the meantime, the Solid IT measurement system has found to be a credible source, such that the website has also been cited at Gartner, InfoWorld, and many other sources. For more details about how this is measured, check out the relevant website on db-engines.com:
http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition

Comparing the top 10 list, we can see that the players have shifted, heavily:

Reproduced with permission of DB-Engines.com
Reproduced with permission of DB-Engines.com

The top 3 elefants are still Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, but the runner-ups have changed. While PostgreSQL is still gaining traction, it has lost grounds compared to MongoDB.

Also, Cassandra and Redis have pushed out Sybase and Teradata from the top 10!

When 2 years ago, there had been only a single non RDBMS in this top 10 list, there are now 3, all of which “schema-less”, and they’re gaining additional momentum.

Clearly, vendors of RDBMS will need to move quickly to accommodate the needs of document storage and key-value storage the way their new competitors do.

For us on the jOOQ blog, a much more interesting perspective is to see where our supported databases currently are in this ranking:

Reproduced with permission of DB-Engines.com
Reproduced with permission of DB-Engines.com

With the recent release of jOOQ 3.7, we’ve added another three databases to our list of now 21 supported RDBMS. Compared to last year’s ranking, almost all of these RDBMS are gaining traction as well, apart from SQL Server.

One thing is certain: We still have very exciting times ahead. Stay tuned for more updates, and check out the current ranking here:

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

10 thoughts on “The 10 Most Popular DB Engines (SQL and NoSQL) in 2015

    1. Surprising at first, but when you think about how many non-software shops just need some database, and given that the pro editions of MS Office has always shipped with Access, which is nicely integrated with Excel and other parts of the Office suite, it becomes a bit less surprising…

    2. Using access 2007 I used VBA to completely write a very stable and elaborate application that is still in use after many years of operation.

  1. I don’t believe this at all. Free and fast and feature packed MySQL used less than Oracle’s bloatware? Can’t be right..

    1. You cannot really compare these two databases. Oracle beats MySQL in dozens of categories, most importantly:

      • Throughput
      • Performance
      • Functionality

      Being free doesn’t buy you those things…

      1. Bollox. Those are 3 things that can be easily compared. MySQL is high performance. Best database I’ve used and I’ve tried many. To be fair never tried Oracle. My spider senses tell me it’s just an over-hyped kludge kept alive by fanboois and big marketing campaigns. My googles only seem to say if you want high performance choose MySQL. The words “high performance” and “Oracle” never seem to exist in the same sentence. If you want more features (not performance), choose Oracle? Don’t need more features. MySQL has more than enough. I prefer high performance. My clients do to. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and LinkedIn use MySQL (and others, but no mention of Oracle). Game over in my book.

  2. DB-engines.com charges 500 euros a year to vendors to correct outdated or wrong entries. If vendors do not participate then you cannot trust the accuracy of the site.

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