June 2022 China Database Popularity Rankings and an Overview of Columnar Databases

In June 2022, the China database popularity ranking listed 231 databases, with TiDB reclaiming the top spot, Dameng entering the top three, and Ruan Jin Cang reaching the top six; the ranking also noted the entry of two new members.

OtterTune, a startup founded in 2021, announced a $12 million Series A round, emphasizing its AI‑driven platform that automatically tunes PostgreSQL and MySQL databases on cloud services such as Amazon RDS and Aurora while consuming minimal system resources.

The PostgreSQL global development team released PostgreSQL 15 Beta 1, offering a preview of all features planned for the final release, including improvements to developer experience, performance, backup, archiving, compression, logical replication, and management.

Google unveiled AlloyDB for PostgreSQL at I/O 2022, a fully managed hybrid row‑column database designed for demanding transactional and analytical workloads, featuring elastic storage and compute, intelligent caching, and AI/ML‑assisted autonomous management.

Columnar databases store data by column rather than by row, which reduces I/O for queries that touch only a subset of columns, improves compression ratios, and boosts performance for OLAP workloads such as data‑warehouse analytics.

The concept of columnar storage dates back to Cantor’s 1983 paper and was formalized in the 1985 SIGMOD paper “A Decomposition Storage Model.” After a quiet period, the field revived in 2005 with Michael Stonebraker’s C‑Store paper, leading to commercial products like Vertica, Amazon Redshift, and the open‑source ClickHouse, and later to widespread adoption in modern cloud data warehouses.

The article also references a comprehensive Chinese database industry analysis report (June 2022) and provides links to related white‑papers, e‑books, and promotional material for further reading.