Most Popular Databases 2008 – 2020

I am a regular user of the website db-engines.com to get an insight into which are the most popular databases, for both RDBMS and NoSQL platforms. It’s always interesting to see which databases are trending up (or down), and definitely seems to be an accurate representation of what organisations are using. I was inspired to see if I could use a similar methodology to check for database popularity, so used the dba.stackexchange.com site as a source of data.

If we were to look at the keywords in each question and answer on the site, then we would get a picture of which database platforms were most popular i.e. more posts about SQL Server would imply that has more use than Oracle for example. The chart below, shows the Top 20 keyword count, and I think it paints a pretty good picture of which are the most popular DB platforms.

The chart shows that Microsoft SQL Server is the most talked about database, followed by MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle, with MongoDB (the first and only NoSQL participant of the top 20) coming in at number 6. Other specific versions of particular databases also comprise the top 20, with SQL Server 2008 and 2012 high in popularity. IBM’s DB2, MariaDB and Microsoft’s Access are also in the top 20, albeit with way less keyword regularity that the top 5. More generic keywords make up the rest of the top 20, with it being no surprise that design and performance are popular topics.

This gives similar data to that of google trends, which tracks keyword interest over time. Here is a chart showing the relative interest of the 5 database types (based on google searches) over the last 5 years. In this data you can see that MySQL has more search traffic than SQL Server, with the other 3 databases less popular. It does also show an uptick in PostgreSQL popularity which is interesting.

The table below shows how many questions were asked on dba.stackexchange.com over the years. It started slowly in 2008, but then gained traffic in 2012 and gets a healthy 17-26k questions per year.