It's far too early to count Oracle out of the database wars. According to a new report from DB-Engines, a site that tracks the popularity of database technologies, Oracle was not only the most widely used and discussed database in the world in 2015, it was also saw the most growth in those areas last year as well, at least by one metric.
That's a surprise because of the past few years, DB-Engines has tracked the rise of a number of newer database systems that discard the traditional way of organizing data in favor of the less structured approaches that Google and Facebook pioneered during their ascendancy in the mid-2000s. These so-called "NoSQL" databases such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Redis have dominated DB-Engines' listings of the fastest growing database technologies in the world, thanks in large part to their fresh approach to managing large or quickly changing volumes of data. What's more, these databases are open source, meaning that anyone in the world can view and edit the code that underpins their software. Oracle has always dominated the rankings, but the fastest growing databases have typically been the newer open source varieties.
An Austrian technology consulting firm called Solid IT created the DB-Engines rating system to help its developers decide which new technologies were worth learning about and which were still too nascent to bother with. The company assigns each database system a score based on data gathered from many sources, such as Google Trends, various job listings sites, social media sites like Twitter, and the programming questions and answers site StackOverflow. To determine the fastest growing database systems, the company looked at which ones had the biggest total change in their scores. There's a limit to DB-Engines' accuracy because the site can't say with certainty how many companies are using any particular technology. Rather it tries to approximate a database's popularity based on job listings and the ebb and flow of conversations about the technology.
Oracle has always been strong on the job listings side, Solid IT co-founder Matthias Gelbmann says, but the growth this year was primarily due to a big increase in the number of conversations about Oracle's flagship product on social media and Q&A sites.
It's not clear why the number of conversations about Oracle increased last year. It could be because more companies are using Oracle's flagship product, but Gelbmann speculates that it might be that older IT pros, the sorts who still use Oracle every day, are adopting social media tools at a faster rate. Or it could be that the large organizations that rely on Oracle technologies are hiring more of the young technologists who have traditionally turned to Stack Overflow when they have a problem. But he can't be certain, because DB-Engines only tracks the trends in the data, not the causes of those trends.
Donnie Berkholz, an information technology analyst at 451 Research points out that sales of new Oracle database licenses have been declining in recent quarters, and that the DB-Engines team hasn't smoothed their data, which means that many of the peaks and valleys in the site's data could be statistical anomalies rather than meaningful changes. But he says that many companies still use Oracle for a variety of reasons, including pre-existing business relationships, difficulties in migrating to other other technologies, as well as technical requirements such as instrumentation, scaling, and performance.
The results don't indicate a comeback for other proprietary relational databases. While Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 remain some of the most highly ranked databases on DB-Engines, both slipped slightly year-over-year. Meanwhile, the open source NoSQL databases MongoDB and Cassandra, some of the top movers since DB-Engines started ranking databases, came in second and third.
The lesson? The world is still adopting new, open source databases at a rapid clip. But old-school Oracle isn't going anywhere yet.
