Why Is SQL Dropping in the TIOBE Rankings? The Rise of NoSQL and AI Data Needs

Lead: As developers shift their focus to NoSQL databases, SQL’s ranking in the TIOBE programming language index has slipped.

The TIOBE index measures the popularity of nearly 100 languages. SQL was re‑included in 2018 because, despite being domain‑specific, it is “Turing‑complete”. It has consistently ranked in the top ten, but in the latest release it fell to 12th place, the lowest in its history, down from eighth a year ago.

TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen notes that SQL will remain a foundational and universal language for databases for decades, yet in the rapidly growing AI field, data is often unstructured, making NoSQL databases more suitable.

NoSQL is now seen as a “serious threat” to the relatively static SQL approach.

Traditional database vendors and data‑management platforms have been steadily expanding their NoSQL integration or offering NoSQL‑like capabilities.

In February, IBM announced plans to acquire NoSQL specialist DataStax to accelerate large‑scale AI production and bring NoSQL into enterprises at scale.

Jansen compares NoSQL’s popularity to the rise of dynamic languages like Python versus static languages such as C++ and Java. Python’s growth is closely tied to its dominance in AI and machine learning development.

Python continues to lead the index with a 25.87% rating, up 10.48% year‑over‑year.

C++, C, Java and C# occupy the top five positions, with only C# showing a slight decline. All languages have scores below 11%.

Other notable changes: Rust slipped one spot to 18th; Ada and R entered the top 20, rising to 11th and 14th respectively; Perl climbed from 27th to 13th; Assembly fell sharply from 13th to 19th.

Among classic languages, Fortran held 10th place, while COBOL sits at 20th, illustrating how languages created between 1949 and 1959 can persist for decades.