Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2022, defending the title from last year

by Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger, 3 January 2023
Tags: DBMS of the year, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake

Snowflake is the database management system that gained more popularity in our DB-Engines Ranking within the last year than any of the other 402 monitored systems.
We thus declare Snowflake as the DBMS of the Year 2022.

For determining the DBMS of the year, we subtracted the popularity scores of January 2022 from the latest scores of January 2023. We use the difference of these numbers, rather than a percentage, because that would favor systems with a tiny popularity at the beginning of the year. The result is a list of DBMSs sorted by how much they managed to increase their popularity in 2022, or in other words, how many additional people started to communicate about it in one of the ways we measure in our methodology, for example job offers, professional profile entries and citations on the web.

DBMS of the Year: Snowflake

Snwoflake Loog

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform, that gained popularity due to its scalability, flexibility and performance. It uses a custom SQL engine and columnar data storage, and offers a wide range of options to connect with external data sources and applications.

Snowflake climbed in our ranking to rank 11, up from rank 17 one year ago. We will see if it can enter the top 10 in 2023.

Runner-up: Google BigQuery

BigQuery is Google's cloud-based data warehouse platform. Besides the usual benefits that come with serverless computing, it comes with built-in machine learning and BI capabilities.

BigQuery stays at rank 21 in our ranking, and is making steady progress.

Third place: PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is regular guest in our DBMS of the Year posts. It won three times and shows up again and again in the top three. PostgreSQL is known as open source DBMS with an advanced feature set. PostgreSQL 15, which was released in October 2022 brought many new features (e.g. support of the SQL MERGE statement, additional filter conditions for the logical replication of tables, structured server log output using JSON format) and performance improvements, particularly for in-memory and on-disc sorting.

We congratulate Snowflake, Google and PostgreSQL on their success in 2022.

Previous winners of the DB-Engines DBMS of the Year Award:

Snowflake	2022
Snowflake	2021
PostgreSQL	2020
MySQL	2019
PostgreSQL	2018
PostgreSQL	2017
Microsoft SQL Server	2016
Oracle	2015
MongoDB	2014
MongoDB	2013

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