Oracle is maintaining its place at the top of the database software rankings, according to new data that has been released by website DB-engines.
The numbers show that the company is still successfully managing to hold off open source challengers, and ranks higher than MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, despite its rating being slightly down from last month.
The data is compiled by Austrian consultancy firm Solid IT, and takes a variety of sources into account. These include Google and Bing searches for the product, Stack Overflow discussions, social media relevance, and job adverts, which are then compiled into a ranking score.
Oracle now has a rating of 1496.08, compared to 1299.26 for MySQL, and 1144.06 for Microsoft SQL Server.
MongoDB and PostgresSQL complete the top 5, with scores of 306.03, and 282.40, respectively. DB2, Microsoft Access, Cassandra, SQLite and Redis fill out the top 10.
The NoSQL database Cassandra was one of the best performers, up 32.20 points from the same time last year, and up 0.11 from December 2015.
Oracle has been under increasing pressure from open source competitors. For example, YouGov is now using MongoDB, and has achieved a 70% reduction in storage.
Bryan Deeney, Senior Developer at YouGov, told CBR: "MongoDB’s dynamic schema provides great flexibility which both enables very rapid prototyping, and facilitates continuous iterative development of applications in production."
The firm made MongoDB 3.0 its default non-relational database, helping the surveying firm deal with the 2-4gb of new data it captures on average every single hour.
DB-engines has been following the rise of these so-called No-SQL databases, which do not organise the data in a traditional way, and adopt the less structured approach adopted by growing Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook, who have data management at the core of their businesses.
However, this data shows that users are not abandoning it just yet for new software.
Microsoft SQL Server is down 54.55 from January 2015, but has recovered 20.90 since last month.
Oracle itself is up 56.92 year on year, benefiting from its ongoing strength in the jobs market, as well as the hiring of younger staff more disposed to using Stack Overflow to discuss technical queries. It’s ranking from December 2015 dropped by 1.47.
In a recent interview with CBR, MariaDB CEO Patrik Sallner, whose firm ranks 23rd and is up four place year-on-year, said that "is spreading to virtualisation software and databases."
"With open source software, because it is a cloud cooperative effort, we can have multiple different people participating in the development.
This means there is more innovation and security issues which can be fixed more quickly," he said.
