What Do the 2020 DB-Engines Rankings Reveal About Today’s Most Popular Databases?

Introduction

In December 2020, DB-Engines updated its database ranking, covering 363 databases. The ranking reflects popularity based on several metrics.

Methodology

Search engine results count for the database name.

Search frequency on search engines.

Mentions in technical discussions on Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.

Job postings mentioning the database on Indeed and Simply Hired.

Usage frequency on professional platforms such as LinkedIn and Upwork.

Mention count on social media like Twitter.

These dimensions are normalized and averaged to produce a popularity score, which measures attention rather than actual installations.

Top Ten Rankings

Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server occupy the top three positions, the only databases with four‑digit scores.

Relational databases dominate six of the top ten spots, reflecting their long history and widespread corporate adoption.

Oracle leads with extensive experience in clustering, high availability, security, and system management.

PostgreSQL, ranked fourth, shows the strongest growth among the top ten.

Top Thirty Rankings

When extending to thirty, seventeen are relational databases.

NoSQL Databases

Non‑relational databases have risen rapidly with the growth of the internet, offering scalability, high performance, and flexibility.

Major categories include:

Key‑Value (e.g., Redis, Memcached) – simple hash‑table storage, high concurrency.

Column‑oriented (e.g., Cassandra, HBase) – efficient for massive distributed storage.

Document‑Oriented (e.g., MongoDB, Couchbase) – flexible JSON/BSON structures, higher query efficiency.

Graph (e.g., Neo4j, JanusGraph) – stores data as nodes and edges for fast graph traversal.

Time‑Series (e.g., InfluxDB, Kdb+, Prometheus) – handles time‑stamped data.

Search Engines (e.g., Elasticsearch, Splunk) – specialized indexing and search capabilities.

Full ranking is available at https://db-engines.com/en/ranking.