Why PostgreSQL Is Climbing the DB‑Engines Rankings in 2017

DB-Engines December 2017 Ranking

Oracle remains #1. Cassandra moved ahead of Redis (Cassandra #9, Redis #8). SAP Adaptive Server passed Solr (SAP Adaptive Server #14, Solr #13). SQLite slipped slightly.

PostgreSQL Trend

PostgreSQL kept its rank in the top‑5 and continues a steady upward trajectory, the only top‑5 database with consistent growth. Its score gap with Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server is narrowing.

Key Feature Milestones

PostgreSQL 9.2 introduced native json data type, allowing storage of JSON documents.

PostgreSQL 9.4 added the binary jsonb type, providing efficient indexing and query performance for JSON data.

Industry Observations

RedMonk analyst James Governor noted “NoSQL and big‑data fatigue,” observing that developers are increasingly replacing MongoDB and Apache Cassandra workloads with PostgreSQL for transactional and analytical use cases.

Citus Extension for Horizontal Scaling

The open‑source Citus extension removes previous barriers to horizontal scaling. It shards tables across multiple nodes and routes transactions and SQL queries to the appropriate worker nodes, enabling massive parallelism and larger aggregate compute, memory, and storage resources.

Citus is offered commercially as a fully managed service, but the core scaling functionality remains free and open source.

Overall Assessment

PostgreSQL’s comprehensive documentation, rich set of native data types (including JSON/JSONB), and vendor‑independent open‑source model make it a strong contender that could eventually overtake MySQL and other incumbents.