The 2018 StackOverflow survey has just been published, with good news for PostgreSQL.

http://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-databases

StackOverflow got more than 100,000 responses from people in a comprehensive 30 minute survey.

PostgreSQL is the third most commonly used database, with 33% of respondents, slightly behind MySQL and SQLServer, yet well ahead of other options. Early in January, the DBEngines results showed PostgreSQL in 4th place behind Oracle, yet here we see that actually Oracle heads up the Most Dreaded list along with DB2, leaving PostgreSQL to power through to 3rd place.

PostgreSQL at 62% is the second most loved database, so close behind Redis (on 64%) that they’re almost even. But then Redis is only used by 18.5% of people and its very much a different beast anyway – yes, its a datastore, but not a full functioned database like PostgreSQL and others.

The distinction for some people will be PostgreSQL is relational, Redis is not. For me, that is not enough since PostgreSQL is and always has been “post-relational” and we know it can handle many different data types and use cases, such as GIS, full-text, documents stores (JSON and XML) as well OLTP, business intelligence with parallel query and even has the ability to handle graph models with recursive graph-search queries.

Notice that neither MySQL nor SQLServer are well loved, yet enough people use them that we can be pretty certain of that as a collective opinion.

Later we learn that SQLServer has a strong correlation with C# and that MySQL has a strong correlation with PHP/HTML/CSS/WordPress, so they are both the main database choice for those software stacks. What’s interesting there is that PostgreSQL doesn’t have any correlation towards Java, Python, Ruby etc. Or if I might interpret that differently, it is equally popular amongst developers from all languages who aren’t already using LAMP or MS stacks.

SQL is the 4th most pervasive language in use, behind Javascript, HTML and CSS. At 58.5% it is way ahead of 5th place Java at 45%.

Later we learn that 57.5% of people love SQL, which is pretty much everyone that uses it.

We’ll do some more analysis when the anonymized data is available, just to double check these analyses.