Five years of DB-Engines.com

by Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger, 11 October 2017
Tags: DB-Engines Ranking

We launched DB-Engines five years ago. This is a little summary of how it started and what we have achieved.

When DB-Engines went online in October 2012 we covered 18 database management systems in 5 categories.

18 systems. What do they say? "If you are not embarrassed by the launch version of your site, then you are launching too late." Well, we certainly followed that rule.

Nevertheless, we already got positive feedback from day one, particularly for our DB-Engines Ranking. Obviously, we were not the only ones that wanted to know how the popularity of the then-new systems such as MongoDB or Cassandra compared to the established systems. Or which one is the most popular DBMS after all, and which ones are the most popular open source systems.

That feedback encouraged us to grow quickly to cover more than 100 systems a few months later. Today we cover 358 systems in 15 categories, 334 of them were included in the last ranking. We keep adding new systems every month. We also drop systems from the ranking if we feel they are no longer relevant in today's DBMS market, but we keep listing them in our systems directory in that case for reference.

In this directory, the second major part of our portal, we show important properties of the systems. Over the years our team at solid IT has researched hundreds of systems and documented thousands of system properties from a vendor-neutral perspective. We are very glad and grateful to have a constructive dialog with most of these vendors when it comes to classifying and evaluating their products. That feedback loop helps us enormously to continuously improve our system descriptions and to keep them up-to-date. Many vendors use the opportunity to add their own, perhaps less vendor-neutral information via our advertising and services options.

One of our yearly highlights is awarding the system with the biggest gain in popularity as DBMS of the Year. This was MongoDB in 2013 and again in 2014, followed by Oracle in 2015 and Microsoft SQL Server in 2016. As we publish the year-to-year changes of the popularity score on the ranking page, you can get an idea who are the favorites for 2017, but there are still three months to go, things can change.

We are very proud to have achieved the recognition and visibility of our portal it has today. We receive 400,000 pageviews per month, we are regularly cited in reputable news sources, in numerous books, WikiPedia articles and in countless of blog posts. The DBMS market is evolving quickly these days, and certainly we don't want to miss any of that in the years ahead.

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