Cloud-based DBMS's popularity grows at high rates

by Paul Andlinger, 12 December 2019
Tags: Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, DBaaS, Firebase Realtime Database, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Firestore, Microsoft Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft Azure Search, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Cloud-based database management systems are continuously increasing in popularity. We analyze the trends and show the big players.

About three years ago we were writing about the popularity of cloud-based DBMS’s. At that time the popularity of those systems just had increased to 1.6% of the overall popularity of all DBMS’s. We think it is time to look what has happened since then.

First let’s be clear: with ‘cloud-based DBMS’ we mean systems which are available only as a cloud service and cannot be installed on premises or rented servers. Based on the popularity scores of the 350 systems in the DB-Engines ranking, we calculated the popularity of cloud-based DBMS’s as percentage of the overall popularity of all systems.

cloud-based DBMS popularity trend

As of December 2019, cloud-based DBMS's account for about 3.7% of the overall DBMS popularity and they show a rather constant upwards trend. We will see in the next rankings if the slight ups and downs of the previous quarter indicate a slow-down of that trend or if they are just statistical anomalies.

The table below lists the ten most popular cloud-based DBMS's and nearly all of them increased their ranks over the last three years:

	Popularity rank December 2019	Popularity rank December 2016
Amazon DynamoDB	16	22
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB	24	59
Microsoft Azure SQL Database	25	28
Google BigQuery	27	38
Amazon Redshift	31	31
Firebase Realtime Database	40	80
Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse	42
Amazon Aurora	47	72
Microsoft Azure Search	52	83
Google Cloud Firestore	56

The big players in that market unsurprisingly are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. For the chart below we also added IBM and Alibaba because they provide at least 2 different cloud-based database systems.

Cloud providers trend chart

As mentioned earlier, the above numbers refer to the specific cloud-based DBMS's and not to cloud-service offerings of database systems, which are not exclusively built for the cloud. So, the various MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB or PostgreSQL DBaaS offerings are not counted in, but do certainly establish an other important variant for consuming database services from the cloud. E.g., MongoDB's Mat Keep told us that the free tier signups for their MongoDB cloud service is already closing the gap with the numbers of downloads of MongoDB.

It will be interesting to see the further evolution of database systems in the cloud.

Share this page