The questions in this section were only answered by respondents who use a database.
Databases
This year Redis joins the podium with a 29% share! This in-memory data structure store, which was first released in 2009, has increased its share by 10 percentage points since 2017. PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MariaDB share are also growing this year.
The results for some questions, including this one, have been split into 2 groups based on the respondents’ involvement with SQL. Those who identified SQL as one of their 3 primary programming languages were sorted into the “SQL is primary” group, while everyone else who has used SQL in the last 12 months was placed in the “SQL is secondary” group. The answers have also been split according to the databases used by the respondents.
As you can see, the top three have almost no differences. The veteran MS SQL Server and Oracle Database are much more popular among SQL professionals whereas SQLite and MongoDB are more popular among those who only occasionally use SQL.
As you can see, the database popularity varies depending on the region. What is relative popularity in our tables? For example, the Redis share in Mexico is less than 10%, whereas worldwide the Redis share is 28.9%. So, the difference is about 19%. If you divide -19% by 28.9%, you get -65%. This is the relative popularity of Redis in Mexico.
There are databases not listed in this table that are popular in some regions, for instance H2 has large popularity in Korea, Amazon Redshift and Cassandra in India, DB2 in Spain, HBase in China, Neo4j in Northern Europe/Benelux, and ClickHouse in Russia.
Also, there are stacks of language+databases. C# with MSSQL; Kotlin, Swift and Dart with SQLite; Go or Ruby with Redis; Java with Oracle; and PHP with MariaDB.
Users' first database tool is listed on the y-axis, and all other tools on the x-axis. For example, 59% of PostgreSQL users also use MySQL, whereas only 35% of MySQL users also use PostgreSQL.
The leaders remain unchallenged and are only really in direct competition with each other: MySQL is less popular among PostgreSQL users and vice versa. At the same time, 21% of respondents use both.
The only significant change is the drop in share of those who use the command line to interact with databases.
Keep in mind that most of the respondents use two or more databases at the same time. So, it’s not unusual for MongoDB users to also use MySQL Workbench.
Redis and MariaDB users are more experienced than others: 38% and 41% of them respectively have been working with databases for more than 7 years.
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