Databases

The questions in this section were only answered by respondents who use a database.

Which databases have you used in the last 12 months?

The rankings are similar to last year, with the exception of MySQL, whose share declined substantially.

Which databases have you used in the last 12 months?

SQL is main

SQL is primary

SQL is secondary

The results for some questions, including this one, have been split into 3 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. Everyone else who has used SQL in the last 12 months was placed in the “SQL is secondary” group. And the third, most involved group, “SQL is main”, comprises those who ranked SQL first among their primary languages. Please note that for most of the questions in this section, the “SQL is main” group accounts for fewer than 100 answers; therefore, the data should be interpreted with caution.

The answers have also been split according to the databases used by the respondents.

As you can see, the two veterans, MS SQL Server and Oracle Database, are much more popular among SQL professionals, whereas SQLite and MongoDB are more popular among those who use SQL occasionally.

Relative popularity of databases by region

What do the relative popularity numbers mean? For example, the share of MS SQL Server in Argentina is 27%, whereas its worldwide share is 18%. Dividing the difference (9%) by 18%, we get +50%. We refer to this as the relative popularity of MS SQL Server in Argentina.

The popularity of databases varies greatly depending on the region. For example, at 36%, MariaDB’s share in France is more than double its global share. For databases not listed in this table, H2 enjoys outsized popularity in Korea, Amazon Redshift and Cassandra in India, DB2 in Spain, HBase in China, Neo4j in Northern Europe and Benelux, and ClickHouse in Russia.

Relative popularity of databases by primary programming language

Certain language and database combinations are popular with developers, including:

C# with MSSQL
Kotlin, Swift, or Dart with SQLite
Go or Ruby with Redis
Java with Oracle
PHP with MariaDB

Which databases have you used in the last 12 months?

The two clear leaders are in direct competition with each other, as MySQL is less popular among PostgreSQL users and vice versa, though 19% of respondents use both.

Which tools do you regularly use for working with databases?

SQL is main

SQL is primary

SQL is secondary

The general trend of moving from the native tools of specific databases (and just the command line) to universal ones continues, particularly toward DataGrip and DBeaver.

Which tools do you regularly use for working with databases?

Considering that most of the respondents (69%) use 2 or more databases at the same time, it’s not strange that Redis users also use pgAdmin, for example.