Most popular databases in 2018 according to StackOverflow survey

The survey results from StackOverflow’s developers survey are already here, and we can now declare the most popular databases for 2018.

Without further ado, let’s look into the results:

So what can we learn from these results?

1. The most popular database is MySQL, and not by far comes SQL Server. This wasn’t very surprising, as they were the top two databases last year as well. This year, more than half of the respondents (58.7%) are using MySQL. It seems RDBMS databases and specifically MySQL are here to stay for at least few years ahead.
2. SQL Server has a large market share as well (41.2%) This is also an increase from last year (30.8%). Microsoft is pushing SQL Server with their Windows Servers, and that way gaining significant market share. In addition, recently Microsoft introduced some AI capabilities in SQL Server over Azure, so we believe it will gain them some more new customers wishing to optimize their database using some artificial intelligence.
3. PostgreSQL is gaining lots of traction in the last few years. Developers working with Postgres are very pleased with the product, both in terms of capabilities and performance. We believe this trend will continue and we’ll see larger usage rates next year.
4. RDBMS databases are still significantly more common than NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.
5. Relatively new technologies are starting to gain market share in the databases world – Redis (first release at 2009) and Cassandra (first release at 2008).
6. Almost 1/4 of all programmers (21.6%) are using SQLite, which is a lite SQL database which is based on a single file. This database has large popularity in small desktop applications and applications where an embedded database is required (for example, mobile phone apps).
7. One might argue that many beginner developers are using MySQL and that’s why the numbers are so high. Well, if you’ll look at the same chart but only for Professional Developers, the numbers look very similar.

To summarize, RDBMS and MySQL are still very popular among tech companies and programmers. NoSQL databases are probably not here to replace those needs, but to be used to solve different requirements.