What Do the DB-Engines March 2021 Rankings Reveal About Today's Top Databases?

DB-Engines March 2021 Database Ranking Overview

DB‑Engines released its March 2021 ranking, evaluating the popularity of 364 database management systems. The top‑10 list is shown below.

Top Performers and Their Movements

Microsoft SQL Server dropped 82.55 points year‑over‑year and 7.63 points month‑over‑month, retaining the “simultaneous decline champion” title for both the year and the month.

Oracle fell 18.91 points year‑over‑year but rose 5.06 points month‑over‑month, holding the “simultaneous decline runner‑up”.

MySQL decreased 4.90 points year‑over‑year and increased 11.46 points month‑over‑month, becoming the “monthly growth champion”.

PostgreSQL scored 549.29, up 35.37 points year‑over‑year, earning the “simultaneous growth runner‑up”. It also won the DB‑Engines “Database of the Year” award in 2017‑2018.

Redis outperformed Elasticsearch this month, taking the top spot with a score of 1.81.

Microsoft Azure ranked 16th and captured the “monthly growth champion” for cloud platforms.

Trend graphs for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake illustrate their popularity trajectories.

Mid‑Tier Rankings (11‑30)

Positions 11‑30 showed modest fluctuations, typically moving one or two places. The biggest year‑over‑year gain was achieved by Snowflake , which jumped 70 places.

Snowflake’s score surged from around 2.67 in September 2020 to 23.19, a nine‑fold increase after its IPO and a 111 % first‑day stock jump.

Technical Highlights

PostgreSQL offers advanced data types such as inet for IP addresses and native JSON support, full‑text search, and extensibility through custom functions and extensions.

Takeaway

The ranking is intended as a technical reference for database professionals; it does not directly reflect technical superiority or market share. Selecting a database should be based on specific business requirements rather than ranking position alone.

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