Why PostgreSQL Captured the 2018 DB-Engines DBMS of the Year Award

2018 DBMS of the Year – PostgreSQL

According to DB‑Engines, PostgreSQL achieved the highest popularity increase among 344 monitored database systems in 2018, making it the 2018 DBMS of the Year.

Ranking methodology

DB‑Engines calculates the yearly change by subtracting the popularity score of January 2018 from the score of January 2019. The absolute difference is used rather than a percentage to avoid bias toward systems with initially low scores.

Technical highlights of PostgreSQL

First released in 1989; celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2019.

Native json and jsonb data types with operators, enabling document‑store use cases.

Recent releases focus on distributed‑database performance and scalability for big‑data workloads.

Active ecosystem includes derivative platforms such as Greenplum, EnterpriseDB, TimescaleDB, and Citus, which are counted separately in the ranking.

Runner‑up – MongoDB

MongoDB, the DBMS of the Year in 2013 and 2014, ranked second in 2018, confirming its position as the leading NoSQL database.

Key improvements

Support for multi‑document ACID transactions, increasing confidence for critical workloads.

Enhanced analytics capabilities, narrowing the functional gap with relational databases.

Third place – Redis

Redis, a high‑performance key‑value store, placed third in the 2018 ranking.

Recent extensions

Modular architecture allows loading third‑party modules.

Available modules provide full‑text search, graph processing, time‑series data, and native JSON support.

Trends observed in January 2019 ranking

While Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server continued to lose popularity points, the three 2018 winners showed growth. Oracle recorded its lowest score to date, MySQL reached a historic low, and SQL Server was projected to fall below 1 000 points.