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What are the best open-source Relational Databases?

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PostgreSQL vs MySQL vs SQLite

 vs MariaDB vs CockroachDB vs ArangoDB vs Firebird vs Presto vs xHarbour vs Oracle Database 12c

Specs

Technology

C

Platforms

Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD

JSON?

Yes

Technology

C/C++

Platforms

-

JSON?

-

Technology

C

Platforms

Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IPhone

JSON?

-

Technology

C, C++, Perl, Bash

Platforms

Windows, Linux, macOS, BSD

JSON?

-

Technology

Go

Platforms

-

JSON?

-

Technology

C++

Platforms

Windows, Linux, Mac

JSON?

-

Technology

C++

Platforms

Windows, Linux, Mac

JSON?

-

Technology

Java

Platforms

Mac, Linux

JSON?

-

Technology

C

Platforms

Windows, DOS, Linux

JSON?

-

Technology

-

Platforms

-

JSON?

-

Pros + Cons

Pro
 Data safety is always the primary concern.

While any other databases are abusing their safety system to show better benchmark result, PostgreSQL never did that. They always chose safety over anything else, and you get full safety by default. You need to be an expert to make it unsafe.
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Pro
 Strong community

PostgreSQL has a strong community backing it, with guides, tutorials and support for any kind of problem a developer may have.
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Pro
  Actively being developed

Postgres has been receiving major feature updates with every release over the past few years, and is quickly gaining on closed source competitors like Oracle.
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Pro
 High performance

PostgreSQL performance increases with each release, this is also proven by many benchmark tests. Notable performance features include: As PostgreSQL only supports one storage engine, it has been able to integrate and optimise it and with the rest of the database. This has resulted in multiple benefits such as the ability to allow different transaction types to co-exist efficiently without the need to select storage engine types once for each table ahead of time. On the fly data compression resulting in less IO required for reading. Asynchronous + synchronous Replication. PostgreSQL supports a asynchronous API for use by client applications. It is reported to increase performance by up to 40% and is not supported by MySQL. Designed to scale very well with large numbers of cores at high concurrency levels.
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Pro
 Easily extendable

Postgres is highly extendable programmatically through custom procedures that are called "stored procedures". These functions give you the ability to simplify the execution of repeated and/or complex operations.
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Pro
 Native JSON support

Postgres recently introduced JSON support, meaning it can be used much in the same way as a Document-store. This is incredibly useful for a hybrid Relational/Document approach.
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Pro
 Powerful stored-procedure

Trigger and function build by PostgreSQL is very flexible. With a tiny learning curve but one can produce a ton of business logics and rules.
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Pro
 Many third-party tools are available

Because of it's popularity and regardless of it's extremely powerful features, Postgres has a lot of third-party apps and tools that make it easy to develop and manage applications built with it.
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Pro
 Object Oriented RDBMS

The Object Oriented approach of PostgreSQL design, which gives it a power full feature in Table inheritance. This is a very nice feature and can map nicely with ORMs in Object Oriented Platforms like EntityFramework and .Net.
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Pro
 Permissive Open-Source License

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License, a liberal Open Source license, similar to the BSD or MIT licenses.
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Pro
 Fully ACID compliant

PostgreSQL is known to have a very holistic approach to robustness and data integrity which is reflected by it being fully ACID compliant. PostgreSQL has always been strict about making sure data is valid before allowing it into the database, and there is no way for a client to bypass those checks. Depending on your requirements, ACID compliance might be important.
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Pro
 Multiple node packages available

There are many packages (like Sequelize) that integrate deeply with the features Postgres offers.
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Pro
 Support Perl and Python for coding stored procedures

Postgres supports popular languages for coding stored procedures, such as Perl and Python. So, you can fairly easy transform just DB-server to reliable Service with complex business logic.
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Pro
 Support for geographic objects

PostgreSQL can be extended to have geographic object support through PostGIS and allows for location queries to be run through SQL.
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Pro
 Actively developed

Regular fixes and features are released.
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Pro
 Support for JSON data type

JSON data can be stored as a column with optional indexes. In 9.4 (upcoming at the time of this writing), JSONB will be a binary version of JSON that will save space. It's like the best of the NO-SQL world without having to give up ACID and Relationships. This means that cascading deletes can be done in a single Transaction across multiple JSON documents.
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Con
 Not suited for small apps

Because of its complexity and power, it may be overkill to use PostgreSQL in small applications that will not make use of its full power.
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Pro
 Scalable

MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload.
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Pro
 Multiple third-party tools that help working with MySQL

Since MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases, maybe the most popular, there exist many third-party tools and applications that help developers to use MySQL in their development.
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Pro
 Easy to start working with

Because of it's popularity there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there that help developers install and work with MySQL. The installation process itself is not very hard and there are multiple powerful GUI tools that make it extremely easy to work with MySQL for a beginner.
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Con
 Error messages usually are not very detailed

When you are trying to do something in MySQL and something goes wrong it will simply give you an error message with an error code. Which does not say much about what went wrong unless you look it up online. This can be a little cumbersome during development.
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Pro
 Self-contained 

SQLite is largely self-contained. It requires very minimal support from external libraries or from the operating system.
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Pro
 Portable

An SQLite database is a single ordinary disk file that can be located anywhere in the directory hierarchy. It works by sending requests to a single file where all the data is kept instead of communicating with a hosted database which gives access to an interface by making use of sockets and ports. The file format used is also cross-platform, so can easily be migrated to various machines. This makes SQLite extremely portable throughout different applications, all that's needed to transfer the whole database is to make a copy of the file.
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Pro
 Reliable

With less complication, there is less to go wrong.
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Pro
 Zero configuration 

There is literally no configuration required to get SQL lite up and running. This is mainly due to SQLite being serverless, there is no separate server process to install, setup, configure, initialize, manage, and troubleshoot.
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Pro
 Great language support 

SQLite has bindings for a large number of programming languages, including BASIC, Delphi, C, C#, C++, Clipper//Harbour, Common Lisp, Curl, D, Free Pascal, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Livecode, Lua, newLisp, Objective-C (on OS X and iOS), OCaml, Perl, PHP, Pike, PureBasic, Python, R, REALbasic, REBOL, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Visual Basic.
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Pro
 Small

SQLite is also only 350KiB in size.
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Pro
 Great for testing and first stages of development

Because of it's ability to scale and with the portability that a single-file database gives you without losing much of the power and features that SQL gives developers, it's a great choice for testing applications and for the early stages of development when the workload and the data that needs to be stored is not that large.
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Con
 Some SQL features are missing

SQLite is made to be extremely lightweight and portable, but it still uses SQL. However, some SQL features such as RIGHT OUTER JOIN and FOR EACH STATEMENT are missing.
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Pro
 Truly open development community

All development decisions for MariaDB can be reviewed and debated on a public mailing list or in the public bug tracker. Contributing to MariaDB is easy and the patch flow is fully transparent and public. But it's not all about the code contribution either - MariaDB also has very active documentation efforts and other related things that help developers in their day-to-day database administration.
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Pro
 More cutting edge features

e.g. GIS since 5.3
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Pro
 Dynamic column support

MariaDB has dynamic column support which allows for some NoSQL type functionality. So one database interface can provide both SQL and NoSQL for different software development needs.
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Pro
 Distributed transactions

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Pro
 High availability

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Pro
 Automated scaling & repair

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Pro
 Cross Cloud Provider Replication/Migration

Run CockroachDB nodes in two or more cloud networks (AWS, GCP, Azure) and replicate the databases. Migrate from one cloud provider to another. See this blog article for details: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cross-cloud-migration/
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Pro
 SQL

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Pro
 Strong consistency

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Pro
 Simplified deployment

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Con
 Immature project

Some important features are missing and heavy use in production is minimal.
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Pro
 Supports joins

Unlike many NoSQL databases, ArangoDB does support joins in AQL queries.
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Pro
 Document and graph-orientend

You can model your data as documents or as a graph - no data model lock-in. You can even combine both models and use them in a single AQL query.
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Pro
 JavaScript-API

You can extend ArangoDB using JavaScript that runs directly on the Server (Google V8). You can build data-centric microservices that aggregate, validate, transform or enrich data (It's up to you, plain JavaScript) and provide those via a custom API route.
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Pro
 Transaction save

You can use ACID Transactions for short and small data retrieval and/or modification operations in ArangoDB.
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Pro
 Powerful Java Driver (Sync & Async)

ArangoDB has a very good Java Driver for synchronous and asynchronous. In addition the team there is working on a Spring Data integration.
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Pro
 Easy cluster setup

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Pro
 Multi-generation architecture

This makes a Firebird database capable of serving simultaneously as both an analytical and an operational data store, because readers do not block writers when accessing the same data under most conditions.
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Pro
 Support of all major platforms and operation systems

Supported platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOS, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris and more. It runs on at x386, x64 and PowerPC, Sparc and other hardware platforms, and supports an easy migration mechanism between these platforms.
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Pro
 Robust, mature architecture, including powerful trigger capabilities

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Pro
 Connectors

Lots of connectors to other databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Mongo, SQL Server etc.
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Con
 No Windows version

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Pro
 Clipper compatible

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Pro
 Reduced downtime during upgrades

Oracle Database has parallel upgrading for high available applications. Updates are made in parallel without keeping the database down.
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Pro
 World wide technical support

Oracle is a large company with specialists in a lot of countries. It's very easy to find consultants and any kind of help with Oracle.
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Pro
 Secure

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Pro
 Stable

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Pro
 High performance parallel quesries

Oracle Database has introduced concurrent execution of union branches, which means that one set of parallel servers will execute one branch, a second set will execute another branch and so on. Instead of the old system where each branch executed one after the other.
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Pro
 Scalable

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Con
 Terrible company reputation

Oracle is very (in)famous for being involved in a number of controversies. Some of them have ended up in lawsuits with other tech companies because of license disputes. The latest one is a lawsuit against Google for Google's implementation of JAVA in their Android ecosystem.
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Con
 Ghost data

To work around ghost data you can after encrypting something, manually move everything out of the old table space and then shred those data files. To be able to get rid of ghost data automatically would be great.
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