DB-Engines announced that Snowflake has successfully defended its title as “Database of the Year 2022”.

DB-Engines is a world-renowned database popularity ranking website. The criteria for selecting the annual database are: calculate the year-on-year growth of the latest popularity score (January 2023) of the database, and the annual database will be the one with the highest score increase.

DBMS of the Year: Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform popular for its scalability, flexibility, and performance. It uses a custom SQL engine and columnar data store, and provides a wide range of options to connect external data sources and applications. At the same time, it integrates data warehouses, data marts, and data lakes, and supports running analytics on these aspects.

According to reports, Snowflake has risen from No. 17 a year ago to No. 11 in the ranking of DB-Engines. It remains to be seen whether it can enter the top 10 in 2023.

Snowflake launched publicly in 2014 and took data warehousing to the next level. Backed by multiple rounds of venture capital funding, it continues to expand its platform and services. In September 2020, Snowflake officially went public.

According to DB-Engines tracking of Snowflake’s popularity score, its initial popularity score was 0.35, which increased to 2.59 in August 2020. The current score is 117.26 points, an increase of 40.44 points during 2022. In DB-Engines’ overall ranking, Snowflake started 2021 at No. 17 and moved up to No. 11 a year later.

Runner-up: Google BigQuery

BigQuery is a cloud-based data warehouse platform created by Google. In addition to the common features provided by serverless computing, it also has built-in machine learning and business intelligence capabilities.

BigQuery’s current ranking in DB-Engines remains at No. 21, and its score has increased by 8.8 points compared with the same period last year, with a total score of 54.43.

Runner-up: PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL has won the Database of the Year title three times and appears in the top three databases of the year consistently.

PostgreSQL is a very active open source product, adding new features and improving functions very frequently, known as an open source DBMS with an advanced feature set. PostgreSQL 15, released in October 2022, brings many new features, such as support for the SQL MERGE statement, additional filter conditions for logical replication of tables, structured server log output using JSON format, and performance improvements, especially optimizing its in-memory and an on-disk sorting algorithm

While it still has a significant score gap with the top three DBMSs in the DB-Engines popularity rankings—Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server—the gap is narrowing. Over the past 12 months, the score gap between Oracle and PostgreSQL has decreased from 660 points to 630.32 points.

DB-Engines annual database over the years:

Finally, look at the January data of the DB-Engines database popularity ranking list, the top twenty are as follows:

DB-Engines ranks database management systems based on popularity, which is updated monthly. The ranking data is based on 5 different indicators:

1. Number of keyword searches on Google and Bing search engines
2. Number of Google Trends searches
3. Job search volume on the Indeed website
4. The number of profiles in LinkedIn that mention the keyword
5. Related questions and number of followers on Stackoverflow

The analysis of this list aims to provide a technical direction reference for database practitioners, and the ranking involved is not based on factors such as the technological advancement of products or market share. Regardless of the ranking, the most important thing is to choose the technology that matches the business needs of the enterprise.