Database Tier List

PostgreSQL Global Development Group. Still developed

• X
• A

Born as POSTGRES at UC Berkeley in 1986. Its extensions and wire protocol made it the default that new databases copy: most hosted services here run it or speak it.

Oracle. Still developed

The M in LAMP. Sun bought it in 2008 and Oracle inherited it in 2010, which is why MariaDB exists. Vitess, PlanetScale, TiDB, and Aurora speak its protocol.

MariaDB plc & MariaDB Foundation. Still developed

Monty Widenius forked MySQL when Oracle was about to own it. Still a drop-in replacement for most apps, and the default MySQL in many Linux distros.

D. Richard Hipp. Still developed

A database in one file, linked into the app. The most deployed database engine there is, now also served at the edge by Cloudflare D1.

Turso. Still developed

An open-contribution fork of SQLite with replication, now followed by Turso Database, a from-scratch Rust rewrite that stays file-compatible with SQLite.

DuckDB Labs & CWI Amsterdam. Still developed

• M

An in-process columnar engine for analytics: SQLite’s idea applied to OLAP, querying Parquet, CSV, and Postgres directly.

Microsoft. Still developed

Started from a Sybase codebase in 1989. Azure SQL Database runs the same engine as a service.

Oracle. Still developed

The first commercial SQL database, still at the top of the DB-Engines ranking.

Google. Still developed

Google’s globally consistent SQL database. Its 2012 paper inspired the distributed SQL wave: CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, and TiDB.

Redis Ltd. Still developed

• D

The in-memory data structure server. Its protocol is spoken by Valkey, Dragonfly, Upstash, and every cache service.

Linux Foundation. Still developed

• V
• A

The BSD-licensed fork of Redis 7.2, started by former Redis maintainers with AWS, Google, and Oracle when Redis left open source in 2024.

MongoDB Inc.. Still developed

The document database that defined the NoSQL era. FerretDB and several cloud services speak its protocol on top of other engines.

Apache & Couchbase. Still developed

CouchDB’s JSON-over-HTTP and sync model, and Couchbase, which grew from a 2011 merger of Membase and CouchOne.

Various. Still developed

Databases that mix documents, relations, and graphs behind their own query languages.

Apache Software Foundation. Still developed

Facebook’s wide-column store, built from Amazon’s Dynamo and Google’s Bigtable designs. ScyllaDB rewrote it in C++.

AWS, Google & Microsoft. Still developed

Proprietary NoSQL services that only run on their own cloud: DynamoDB, Firestore, Bigtable, and Cosmos DB.

Elastic. Still developed

Distributed search and analytics on Apache Lucene, the E in the ELK stack.

OpenSearch Software Foundation. Still developed

AWS forked Elasticsearch 7.10 when Elastic dropped the Apache license, and moved it to the Linux Foundation in 2024.

Various. Still developed

• T

Typo-tolerant, instant search built for app search boxes rather than log analytics.

Various. Still developed

• P
• W
• C

Built for nearest-neighbor search over embeddings, the retrieval half of RAG. Postgres (pgvector) and most engines here added vectors too.

Various. Still developed

Nodes and relationships queried with Cypher, now standardized as ISO GQL.

Various. Still developed

• Q

Optimized for timestamped metrics and events: fast ingest, downsampling, and time-window queries.

Various. Still developed

• M

Column stores that scan billions of rows: cloud warehouses that separate storage from compute, and ClickHouse.