SQL Databases

January 19, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

These are mostly SQL databases of various forms, usually RDBMS or MPP, but some without referential integrity or ACID compliance.

DB Rankings

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

Open Source Databases

Open Source RDBMS

  • MySQL - easy to use with easy DB replication features
  • PostgreSQL - high quality open source database - the natural open source choice to move away from Oracle (one company where I was a semi Oracle DBA for a few years did exactly this migration after my time)

These are so popular that every major cloud provider has a managed service to host them for you - eg. AWS RDS, GCP Cloud SQL, Azure Databases and Digital Ocean Managed Databases.

Open Source MPP Databases

Open Source Small Embedded Databases

Useful for local or embedded usage rather than multi-user servers like most major RDBMS systems.

  • SQLite - small fast local SQL DB that can store data in a simple file DevOps-Bash-tools repo
  • DuckDB - single process local SQL DB akin to SQLite with minimal dependencies

Cloud Databases

  • AWS Redshift - managed SQL cluster, built on ParAccel MPP columnar DB built on PostgreSQL, charges on a VMs running basis
  • AWS Athena - serverless DB that operates on AWS S3 files or various data formats and charges by query
  • GCP BigQuery - serverless DB that charges by query

Proprietary / Legacy Databases

  • Oracle - an OG of RDBMS databases with good performance, durability and PL/SQL advanced SQL dialect. Notoriously expensive
  • Microsoft SQL Server - slightly more user friendly than Oracle, with Transact SQL aka TSQL
  • Netezza - specialist rack appliance, even more expensive than Oracle

Databases Scaling Cheatsheet

Databases Scaling Cheatsheet

Database Sharding

DB Sharding

Memes

If Coffee Doesn't Wake You Up

If Coffee Doesn't Wake You Up

10x Performance - Backed up DB?

10x Performance - Backed up DB