Mirror mirror on the wall,
Who is the fairest Database of all?
A frequently asked question, certainly.
DB-Engines recently announced it’s DBMS of the Year. Maybe the cool thing is that PostgreSQL is in 3rd Place. Yee-ha, an open source project is up there!
Let’s look closely about what this means.
PostgreSQL.org’s agreed response was this…
“It’s great to see the continued success of PostgreSQL being reflected in DB-Engines rankings. It’s clear that the strength of the following for the World’s Most Advanced Open Source Database is enough to outweigh the largest software companies as people continue to choose to move away from commercial databases.”
though because of commercial sensitivity this was toned down to this
“It’s great to see the continued success of PostgreSQL being reflected in DB-Engines rankings. It’s clear that the strength of the following for the World’s Most Advanced Open Source Database is enough to draw people away from commercial databases.”
What were the commercial sensitivities? (What about “open source sensitivities”? Well, blame me, cos I agreed to the change.)
Well, the title of the post is that a Microsoft product is actually DBMS of the Year, even though it’s not ranked #1 on the main list, that’s still Oracle. And Postgres is #3 on DBMS of the Year, even though we moved through to #5 again, competing with MongoDB for position #4 (although mostly level).
My guess is that Microsoft would like to highlight how it gets more press than PostgreSQL, a point I would concede in an instant. Whether that means it is more popular or has better features is a different thing entirely. People are simply leaving commercial databases in droves to come to PostgreSQL, which is clearly reflected in the very public decline of Oracle licencing revenues over the last 10 quarters and I’m sure its just the same for Microsoft revenue.
The purpose of the announcement from PostgreSQL.org was to highlight that “the strength of the following for the World’s Most Advanced Open Source Database is enough to outweigh the largest software companies”, though my conclusion is that we are not YET in a position to do that. Larger marketing budget does still give a larger audience. Real world usage does still show PostgreSQL usage increasing at an amazing rate. And our technology continues to set the pace of feature development that other databases would like to achieve.
Number 3 means we’re on the list. We can discuss exactly what place we’re at, but its enough to put us on the short list for every major technology decision – worldwide. And when people see the feature list, price and responsive support, the effect is compelling.
Anyway, ain’t no such thing as bad publicity, so we’re all happy.
Thanks very much to DBEngines for mentioning PostgreSQL in this post…
http://db-engines.com/en/blog_post/67
Anyway, I do thank Microsoft for continuing to support PostgreSQL in its framework and driver.
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