Don't call it a comeback, but Microsoft's database software may be seeing a resurgence. According to research conducted by the Austrian consulting company Solid IT, Microsoft SQL Server's popularity grew faster than any other database product the company tracked on its DB-Engines site during 2016. That's good news for Microsoft because, despite holding tight to the number three spot in the rankings for the past few years, SQL Server's popularity had been waning. Now it's on the rise, and Microsoft's long-deferred embrace of open source software may deserve a lot of the credit.

Last year, the top spot went to Oracle, which remains the most popular database in the rankings. At a glance, you might think the results are bad news for open source databases, since Oracle's flagship database and Microsoft SQL Server are both proprietary. But open source databases overall are still growing in popularity faster than commercial databases, with Microsoft bucking the trend. Most notably, Oracle's own open source database, MySQL, is now almost as popular as the company's proprietary flagship database.

And it could well be open source software that helped drive more adoption of Microsoft SQL Server in 2016. In March, Microsoft announced that it would release a version of SQL Server that runs on the open source Linux operating system. The company delivered a preview version of the software in November. Linux is extremely popular with web developers and is now in use on about one quarter of all the servers running in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Bringing SQL Server to Linux, in other words, opened up a big new market for the product.

DB-Engines

Solid IT, which originally started tracking database popularity to help the company make decisions on what databases to use for its own projects, assigns each of the databases a score based data culled from a variety of sources, including Google Trends, assorted job listing sites, and programming question and answer sites like Stack Overflow. The upside of this method is that it's not swayed by a single metric. The downside is that it can't say with any certainty how many companies are actually using a particular product in the real world. It's possible, for example, that the growing popularity of Microsoft's cloud service Azure is driving the seeming surge. Solid IT tracks Microsoft's Azure SQL Database service separately, but since it's based on SQL Server, some people might be using the terms interchangeably.

Either way, that still means developers are buzzing about Microsoft. Yes, the company's seeming success this year could have been influenced in part by hype generated by the announcement of the Linux version of SQL Server, not by an actual uptick in use. Even that's good news for a company that once seemed to be fading in favor among software developers. Microsoft clearly has their attention again.