Each year, Stack Overflow conducts a survey amongst its developer community and asks them some key questions. Results of the survey give some very interesting insights into trending technologies and popularity amongst the developer community. Because increasingly, it is the application developers who make key decisions regarding technology adoption in an enterprise, I make a point each year of studying how PostgreSQL is faring amongst this community.
This year, PostgreSQL came out as the most popular, the most admired, and the most desired database amongst Stack Overflow’s community. I thought it would be interesting to study the last 5 surveys and see how database technologies have been trending over these years. To choose which databases to track, I leaned on DB-Engines and the current top 5 databases based on their rankings. The figure below captures 10 years of ranking for Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, & MongoDB.
Reference: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend
It is worth pointing out that the graph above is at logarithmic scale.
The graphs below depict 5-year trends for the most popular, the most admired, and the most desired database technologies …
Most Popular
Raw numbers are given in the table below
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
| PostgreSQL | 34.3 | 36.1 | 40.42 | 43.59 | 45.55 |
| Oracle | 16.5 | 16.5 | 12.61 | 11.49 | 9.8 |
| MySQL | 54 | 55.6 | 50.18 | 46.85 | 41.09 |
| MS SQL Server | 32.8 | 33 | 26.87 | 26.87 | 25.45 |
| MongoDB | 25.5 | 26.4 | 27.7 | 28.3 | 25.52 |
Most Admired/Loved
Raw numbers are given in the table below
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
| PostgreSQL | 69.6 | 63.9 | 70.4 | 72.08 | 71.32 |
| Oracle | 38.2 | 33.2 | 35.18 | 35.33 | 36.03 |
| MySQL | 53.9 | 47.1 | 51.35 | 51.17 | 50.77 |
| MS SQL Server | 57.5 | 50.9 | 54.08 | 54.95 | 54.66 |
| MongoDB | 59.5 | 56 | 60.28 | 60.51 | 55.21 |
Most Desired/Wanted
Raw numbers are given in the table below
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
| PostgreSQL | 13.6 | 15.6 | 17.99 | 19.05 | 42.27 |
| Oracle | 3.4 | 4.2 | 2.8 | 2.24 | 4.85 |
| MySQL | 8.2 | 9 | 9.76 | 7.99 | 24.35 |
| MS SQL Server | 3.3 | 3.7 | 3.11 | 2.62 | 15.5 |
| MongoDB | 17.8 | 19.4 | 17.86 | 17.26 | 22.7 |
Note that Stack Overflow replaced the previous loved/dreaded/wanted category with admired/desired with a slight change in methodology. The change explains the sharp change in the desired/wanted status of databases in 2023 in the above figure.
Links to these surveys in reverse chronological order are given below:
- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023
- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022
- 2021: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021
- 2020: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020
- 2019: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019
Hope you found this helpful!
