UPDATE: The top databases for 2018 were declared by StackOverflow's 2018 survey.

The survey results from StackOverflow's developers survey are already here, and we can now declare the most popular databases for 2017.

Without further ado, let's look into the results:

So what can we learn from these results?

The most popular database is MySQL, and not by far comes SQL Server. Almost half of the developers who answered the survey (44.3% out of 36,935 responders) are using MySQL. It seems RDBMS databases and specifically MySQL are not going anywhere anytime soon. Although not open source nor free, SQL server seems to have a very large market share. I believe this is the case because many companies own a general license to Microsoft products (Windows Server, Visual Studio, Office, etc.), so throwing SQL server into the mix just doesn't cost any extra. RDBMS databases are still significantly more common than NoSQL databases such as MongoDB. Relatively new technologies are starting to gain market share in the databases world - Redis (first release at 2009) and Cassandra (first release at 2008). Almost 1/4 of all programmers (23.3%) are using SQLite, which is a lite SQL database which is based on a single file. This small database software is gaining popularity among developers, probably mostly for simple and standalone applications. One might argue that many beginner developers are using MySQL and that's why the numbers are so high. Well, if you'll look at the same chart but only for Professional Developers, the numbers look very similar.

To summarize, RDBMS and MySQL are still very popular among tech companies and programmers. NoSQL databases are probably not here to replace those needs, but to be used to solve different requirements.

Disclaimer: charts and data copyrights are of StackOverflow. EverSQL is in no way associated with StackOverflow.