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DB-Engines launched
by Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann, 1 October 2012
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Database management systems are exciting again
Until recently, the field of database management systems seemed to be taken by the 3 big players (Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) and a handful of underdogs, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. All these systems are relational DBMS, and few people worked on alternatives to this established way of storing and retrieving data.
That has changed in the last 5 years or so. Companies such as Google, Amazon or Facebook built enormous data centers, much larger than anything we have seen before. The bright engineers there had to find a more efficient way to deal with these huge amounts of data, and they came up with ideas like Google's Bigtable and Amazon's Dynamo.
That was the beginning of the NoSQL movement, and the field of database management systems became exciting again. Many people started to work on innovative ways to deal with Big Data scenarios, with scalable, flexible, distributed, fault-tolerant, high-performance and high-availability systems. Nothing was taken for granted any longer, new concepts and new tools were developed at an amazing pace and combined with old, almost forgotten ideas. Even if hardly anyone has needs for data processing at Google's scale, the new ways of dealing with data turned out to be applicable at a wide range of problems. At the same time, it was clear that relational DBMS still had their place, and the originally negative "No SQL" slogan quickly turned into "Not Only SQL".
That's where we are now. We see a confusing stream of new developments that makes it difficult to keep track of what's going on.
DB-Engines.com
DB-Engines tries to help in that situation by providing information on that subject in a way that is easy to grasp and to understand.
We provide an overview of the most relevant database management systems, old and new, where you can examine the properties for each system, and you can compare them side by side.
We also provide a new ranking of the popularity of each of these systems, as determined by our own ranking method.
The information on this site is intended to help to get a quick overview of the existing systems, how they compare, and how many people work with them. We hope this to be a valuable source for database developers and IT managers.
About Us
We are a team of IT consultants specialized in database development, training and consulting. We collect this information because we need it for our own work, and we hope that we can help others by sharing it on that site.
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