What are the best open-source Relational Databases?

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8

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Considered

80

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Recs.

Dec 19, 2020

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Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 7 OptionsWhy?

Best open-source Relational Databases	Price	Technology	Platforms
93 PostgreSQL	Free / paid	C	Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD
-- SQLite	-	C	Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IPhone
-- MySQL	-	C/C++	-
-- MariaDB	-	C, C++, Perl, Bash	-
-- CockroachDB	-	Go	-

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6 Other Options Considered

SQLite

Top Pro

Self-contained

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

Top 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. See More

Specs

Technology:C

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IPhone

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Reliable

With less complication, there is less to go wrong. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Small

SQLite is also only 350KiB in size. See More

Top 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. See More

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MySQL

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Specs

Technology:C/C++

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

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MariaDB

Top 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. See More

Specs

Technology:C, C++, Perl, Bash

Top Pro

More cutting edge features

e.g. GIS since 5.3 See More

Top 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. See More

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ArangoDB

Top Pro

Supports joins

Unlike many NoSQL databases, ArangoDB does support joins in AQL queries. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Open-source NoSQL database with a flexible data model for documents and an SQL like query language. See More

Specs

Technology:C++

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Transaction save

You can use ACID Transactions for short and small data retrieval and/or modification operations in ArangoDB. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Easy cluster setup

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Oracle Database 12c

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PostgreSQL

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Specs

Technology:C

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD

JSON?:Yes

Top Pro

Strong community

PostgreSQL has a strong community backing it, with guides, tutorials and support for any kind of problem a developer may have. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Permissive Open-Source License

PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License, a liberal Open Source license, similar to the BSD or MIT licenses. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Multiple node packages available

There are many packages (like Sequelize) that integrate deeply with the features Postgres offers. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed

Regular fixes and features are released. See More

Top 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. See More

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The Best 1 of 7 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for PostgreSQL

My Recommendation for PostgreSQL

Data safety is always the primary concern.

Not suited for small apps

Strong community

Actively being developed

High performance

Easily extendable

Native JSON support

Powerful stored-procedure

Many third-party tools are available

Object Oriented RDBMS

Permissive Open-Source License

Fully ACID compliant

Multiple node packages available

Support Perl and Python for coding stored procedures

Support for geographic objects

Actively developed

Support for JSON data type

6 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for SQLite

My Recommendation for SQLite

Self-contained

Some SQL features are missing

Portable

Reliable

Zero configuration

Great language support

Small

Great for testing and first stages of development

My Recommendation for MySQL

My Recommendation for MySQL

Scalable

Error messages usually are not very detailed

Multiple third-party tools that help working with MySQL

Easy to start working with

My Recommendation for MariaDB

My Recommendation for MariaDB

Truly open development community

More cutting edge features

Dynamic column support

My Recommendation for CockroachDB

My Recommendation for CockroachDB

High availability

Immature project

Distributed transactions

Automated scaling & repair

Cross Cloud Provider Replication/Migration

SQL

Strong consistency

Simplified deployment

My Recommendation for ArangoDB

My Recommendation for ArangoDB

Supports joins

Document and graph-orientend

JavaScript-API

Transaction save

Powerful Java Driver (Sync & Async)

Easy cluster setup

My Recommendation for Firebird

My Recommendation for Firebird

Multi-generation architecture

Support of all major platforms and operation systems

Robust, mature architecture, including powerful trigger capabilities

Don't see your favorite option? Add it.

My Recommendation for Oracle Database 12c

My Recommendation for Oracle Database 12c

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