Why Snowflake Won DB‑Engines 2022 Database of the Year and What It Means

DB‑Engines announced that Snowflake successfully defended its title and was awarded the “2022 Database of the Year” award.

DB‑Engines, a globally recognized database popularity ranking site, selects the annual database based on the year‑over‑year increase of the popularity score (January 2023) – the database with the largest increase wins.

2022 Database of the Year: Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud‑based data platform praised for its scalability, flexibility, and performance. It uses a custom SQL engine and columnar storage, offers extensive connectivity to external data sources and applications, and integrates data warehouses, data marts, and data lakes for analytics.

According to DB‑Engines, Snowflake rose from 17th place a year ago to 11th place today; whether it will break into the top‑10 in 2023 remains to be seen.

Snowflake was launched publicly in 2014, raising data‑warehouse capabilities to a new level. Backed by multiple rounds of venture capital, it continuously expands its platform and services, and went public in September 2020.

Tracking Snowflake’s popularity score shows an initial 0.35 points, rising to 2.59 points in August 2020, and reaching 117.26 points in 2022 – an increase of 40.44 points during that year. Its overall DB‑Engines ranking moved from 17th in early 2021 to 11th a year later.

Runner‑up: Google BigQuery

BigQuery is Google’s cloud‑based data‑warehouse platform. In addition to typical serverless compute features, it includes built‑in machine‑learning and business‑intelligence capabilities.

BigQuery currently holds the 21st position in the DB‑Engines ranking, with a score increase of 8.8 points year‑over‑year, totaling 54.43 points.

Third Place: PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL has won the Database of the Year award three times and consistently appears among the top three annual winners.

It is a highly active open‑source product with frequent feature additions and improvements, offering an advanced feature set for an open‑source DBMS. PostgreSQL 15, released in October 2022, introduced many new features such as SQL MERGE support, additional filtering for logical replication, JSON‑formatted structured server logs, and performance enhancements, especially in memory and disk sorting algorithms.

Although the score gap between PostgreSQL and the top‑three DB‑Engines (Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server) remains large, the gap is narrowing; over the past 12 months the difference between Oracle and PostgreSQL fell from 660 points to 630.32 points.

Historical DB‑Engines “Database of the Year” Winners

Snowflake – 2022

Snowflake – 2021

PostgreSQL – 2020

MySQL – 2019

PostgreSQL – 2018

PostgreSQL – 2017

Microsoft SQL Server – 2016

Oracle – 2015

MongoDB – 2014

MongoDB – 2013

Ranking Methodology

DB‑Engines updates its popularity ranking monthly, based on five indicators:

Keyword search volume on Google and Bing.

Search volume on Google Trends.

Job search volume on Indeed.

Number of LinkedIn profiles mentioning the keyword.

Number of related questions and followers on Stack Overflow.

The analysis aims to provide database professionals with a technical direction reference; the rankings do not reflect product technical superiority or market share. Choosing technology that fits business needs is more important than ranking position.