For most software developers, their work involves databases in some way or another, but only for a very few is it their primary area of focus. For example, 56% of our respondents said that they use SQL, but only 3% specified SQL as a primary language.

Note: Because the wording of this question has changed, the figures cannot be compared with those from the previous year.

Which databases have you used in the last 12 months?

There are some language-specific database preferences. For example, 20% of Scala developers use Apache Cassandra, while 70% of C# developers use MS SQL Server. MongoDB is very popular among TypeScript developers (45%) and Go developers (41%). 9 out of 10 PHP developers use MySQL, while a half use MariaDB. The most ‘SQLful’ databases are Oracle, MS SQL Server, and ClickHouse, as about a third of their users indicate SQL as their primary language.

This question was only answered by respondents who use any database.

Note: Because the wording of this question has changed (from “6 months” to “12 months”), the figures cannot be compared with those from the previous year.

Do you plan to adopt / migrate to other databases in the next 12 months? If so, to which ones?

70% are happy with their database and are not planning to migrate to or adopt any new.

This question was only answered by respondents who use any database.

Note: The previous year’s question was only answered by respondents who regularly used SQL (PL/SQL, T-SQL and other programming extensions over SQL).

Which tools do you regularly use for working with databases?

For the second year in a row, we are seeing a decline in the popularity of MySQL Workbench (down from 30% to 24%), phpMyAdmin (27% to 21%), and Command Line (27% to 24%) for database management.