Has MySQL finally lost its mojo?

von Matthias Gelbmann, 1. Juli 2013
Tags: Drizzle, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Percona Server

MySQL lost rank 2 to Microsoft SQL Server in the DB-Engines ranking. Is this a temporary fluctuation in popularity as we have seen it before, or is this more?

MySQL and SQL Server have already changed places a few times in our ranking. That by itself doesn't necessarily indicate a long-term trend. But there are other developments that make us wonder whether MySQL has now lost its mojo.

People over at long-term archrival PostgreSQL would say: No, it never had any.

But it certainly had, and still has, a huge user base. What we see more and more is that a fair number of these users are looking for alternatives. Wikipedia started using MariaDB for its websites. Red Hat will no longer ship MySQL as its default database, just like Slackware has done before.

We see that trend reflected in our rankings too: the MySQL derivates MariaDB, Drizzle, Percona Server all gained points this month.

rank	DBMS	change in ranking score
2.	MySQL	-29.71
34.	MariaDB	+0.51
58.	Drizzle	+0.05
67.	Percona Server	+0.23
see more details in the complete ranking

Whether these changes are more motivated by some technical superiority of the MySQL forks, or by the perception of a dwindling MySQL support by Oracle is up for discussion.

To put all of that into perspective however, we should not forget that the development and the success of MySQL was a major achievement in many ways. It has fundamentally changed the database industry for ever, and as one of the most successful open source projects, it had a significant impact on the software industry as a whole. Sooner or later some DBMS may take its place as the first choice for so many software projects, but to outshine its historical relevance will take much, much longer.

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