back to article Open source PostgreSQL named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines

Open source PostgreSQL was today named database management system of the year by popular ranking site DB-Engines. The award follows a surge in popularity for the relational system, which was first developed in the 1980s. In June last year, it was named the most popular database engine among developers, according to a massive …

  1. Richard Tobin

    SQLite

    I wonder what their ranking system does to keep SQLite off the top (it appears to be 11th)? It's run on more or less every phone and computer in the world.

    SQLite isn't good for everything, but if it does what you need, it has the great advantage that you don't run a server - the database file is instead mapped into your program.

    1. ldo Silver badge

      Re: SQLite

      That’s the first thing that comes to mind every time I see a survey about DBMSes. SQLite is by far the world’s most popular DBMS, just from installations alone, and possibly also including apps developed for it as well. What other criteria could there be?

      It’s an amazingly complete SQL implementation. It even does joins and subqueries. The only things it’s missing have to do with multiuser access and replication, that kind of “enterprise-style” thingy.

      1. David Harper 1

        Re: SQLite

        "The only things it’s missing have to do with multiuser access and replication, that kind of “enterprise-style” thingy."

        Or real databases, as we DBAs like to call them.

        1. Tim99 Silver badge

          Re: SQLit

          I don't necessarily recommend it but multiuser will work quite well with Write-Ahead Logging: SQLite.org as a back-end database for web sites at the hundreds of concurrent users level (Caveat: A web app is a "single user" - I have built stuff that works well with several million rows of data, but admittedly only with a few tens of concurrent users - Which may well be similar to a significant number of applications out there; and these apps can be quickly upsized to PostgreSQL ).

          Replication can be enabled with several third party FOSS and commercial tools like rqlite, Lightstream, and LiteSync. For my stuff there are usually "quiet times", so VACUUM/INTO and/or sqldiff work well.

          I'm retired from paid work, and only do smallish pro bono stuff now. I started with DEC Rdb and Oracle 5, but ran quickly to SQL Server (4.2 and later), and PostgreSQL when punters realized how much Oracle was going to cost them.

          1. Len
            Happy

            Re: SQLit

            I've only used SQLite in some small to medium sized web projects but as I understand not all concurrency is the same when it comes to SQLite. Read concurrency is high because it doesn't require locks, hence the benchmarks that suggest that having 100,000 visitors a day to a website running off SQLite is fine. If the server can keep the entire DB in its RAM it's even blazing fast, which probably explains why SQLite is sometimes faster than having a DB server because it doesn't have to open connections.

            The challenge is that only one user can write at any time due to file locks. That is fine for an average website CMS where you rarely have more than a handful of people adding things roughly around the same time. It will be a problem if the visitors to your site do more than read content and you need to allow writes to the DB too.

            As of a couple of years my modus operandi is to start projects using SQLite. If the projects take off and run into limitations I upgrade to Postgres. Talking to an SQLite DB uses more or less a subset of Postgres anyway so migration is easy. I haven't touched another DB system in years.

    2. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: SQLite

      If you read their "methodology" (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition) you'll see it's basically a social media popularity contest... i.e. what's the "coolest" not what's the most installed/actually used.

      * Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google and Bing for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for <system name> together with the term database, e.g. "Oracle" and "database".

      * General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.

      * Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.

      * Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.

      * Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional network LinkedIn.

      * Relevance in social networks. We count the number of Twitter (X) tweets, in which the system is mentioned.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: SQLite

        That's a reasonable definition of "popular". If you prefer to rank DBMSes based on a different definition, no one's stopping you.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Second life in the cloud

    For whoever needs the best of both world: relational database but cloud based, then postgresql is probably one of the best options, if not the best.

    When you add to the mix specifically-designed-for-cloud variants such as AWS Aurora (a multi-region drop-in for postgresql and mysql) then the sky is the limit.

    Uncle Larry can only cry and wonder why he couldn't buy it and kill it.

    1. werdsmith Silver badge

      Re: Second life in the cloud

      As somebody who works extensively with commercial DB products, I absolutely adore PostgreSQL and I’m doing everything I can to displace the old SQL Server instances with it where appropriate (most places). Roadmap proposed.

      Managed to get rid of Oracle some years ago.

      1. Abominator

        Re: Second life in the cloud

        Same.

      2. Dbdominator

        Re: Second life in the cloud

        I have mixed emotions on this due to the hoops we're having to create to mimic many of the operational tasks we currently have in place with SQL Server.

  3. Briantist69

    shame about pgAdmin

    Nice database, shame about pgAdmin.

    1. dtpoirot

      Re: shame about pgAdmin

      dBeaver is dBomb

    2. Pierre 1970

      Re: shame about pgAdmin

      Generally speaking (and with a grain of salt since MS SQL Server fill my fridge) I've found that the achilles heel in this GPL DBs is the official Admin client. Lack of features, lack of consistent look and feel, slow.

      I do disagree when the solution to that is the use a 3rd party tool as the Admin interface.

  4. dtpoirot

    Remembering the 'good' old days...

    Remember back when different drives with different file systems were used for the different Postgres tables and all the cool kids were running BSD because Windows sucked so badly at Postgres?

    1. ldo Silver badge

      Re: because Windows sucked so badly at Postgres?

      Doesn’t it still?

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