SQL Server: More popular than all open-source NoSQL engines combined

(popularity ranked here)

GE’s famous CEO Jack Welch had a mantra, if one of his product lines wasn’t in 1st or 2nd place, he would get rid of them. Some might say that’s a little too harsh, but regardless, when you have a few dominant players, to them almost everyone else is food.

In the Steve Balmer/Bill Gates days, cutthroat Microsoft marketers would have said

NoSQL has NoFuture

Google seems to have finally realized that. A cynical blogger tells their story: Did Google Send the Big Data Industry on a 10 Year Head Fake?

Any one of the 3 most popular db engines, all relational, is more popular than all the other open source non-SQL/NoSQL engines combined. Long list of 127 minnows at the bottom.

But there are always interesting ideas from the non-mainstream. Oracle and Microsoft continue to buy companies or copy their ideas (often improving them) and release them in their own products. A list of technologies shipped in SQL Server and in the first non-relational db:

SQL Server	Non-Relational First
1995: Replication	1989: Lotus Notes
1999: OLAP	1983: TM1
2000: Distributed Data	2009: MongoDB
2000: User-Defined Functions	1986: Gemstone
2000: Data Mining	2006: Rapidminer
2005: XML	1999: Tamino
2005: User-defined types	1986: Gemstone
2008: 2-D and geospatial data	2013: RavenDB
2008: Wide column	2011: Cassandra
2008: Full-text indexes	2017: MongoDB
2010: Cloud version	2012: DynamoDB
2012: Column-store	2012: Druid
2012: File system managed by/stored in DB	No other DB does this
2014: In-memory tables	2009: Redis
2016: JSON in tables	2013: Couchbase
2016: Temporal tables	2015: MarkLogic
2016: R integration	No non-relational DB does this
2017: Python integration	No other DB does this
2017: Graph data	2007: Neo4J
2019: Java integration	2003: ObjectDB

Popularity of SQL Server vs. Open-Source Non-Relational DB Engines

Product	Popularity
SQL Server	1095.51
MongoDB	341.41
Elasticsearch	131.36
Redis	130.11
Cassandra	119.09
Solr	63.21
HBase	59.69
Neo4j	40.90
Memcached	33.79
Couchbase	32.34
CouchDB	19.85
InfluxDB	10.76
Hazelcast	9.20
Ehcache	6.94
Sphinx	6.27
Riak KV	6.21
OrientDB	5.68
RethinkDB	4.30
Aerospike	4.18
Accumulo	3.97
Jackrabbit	3.92
ArangoDB	3.80
Ignite	3.16
RavenDB	2.98
RRDtool	2.75
Oracle NoSQL	2.49
PouchDB	2.47
Oracle Berkeley DB	2.44
LevelDB	2.36
Jena	2.35
Infinispan	2.26
Graphite	2.19
OpenTSDB	1.70
RocksDB	1.57
Db4o	1.21
Druid	1.06
Prometheus	1.06
Giraph	1.04
Mnesia	.97
BaseX	.96
Geode	.88
eXist-db	.72
NCache	.62
ZODB	.59
Event Store	.59
Sedna	.55
Tarantool	.49
Xapian	.46
SciDB	.44
KairosDB	.43
Tokyo Cabinet	.43
MapDB	.42
Perst	.41
Graph Engine	.40
ScyllaDB	.37
LiteDB	.37
WiredTiger	.37
Tokyo Tyrant	.33
Project Voldemort	.33
Janus Graph	.29
Rial TS	.27
Scalaris	.26
Rasdaman	.26
LokiJS	.25
Percona Server for MongoDB	.25
Redland	.24
Sequoiadb	.23
BoltDB	.23
Kyoto Cabinet	.21
RDF4J	.20
NEventStore	.20
OpenQM	.18
Hibari	.18
BigchainDB	.17
RedStore	.16
HyperGraphDB	.15
STSdb	.15
Dgraph	.14
FlockDB	.13
Blazegraph	.13
Mulgara	.12
BrightstarDB	.12
InfoGrid	.11
4store	.11
Hawkular Metrics	.11
EJDB	.11
GridDB	.10
ModeShape	.10
RaptorDB	.10
Blueflood	.10
SenseiDB	.09
WakandaDB	.06
CubicWeb	.05
DensoDB	.04
NosDB	.04
TinkerGraph	.04
Bangdb	.04
SiriDB	.04
Kyoto Tycoon	.04
FleetDB	.03
TimescaleDB	.03
Upscaledb	.03
Warp 10	.03
LedisDB	.02
WhiteDB	.02
HGraphDB	.02
TayzGrid	.02
CodernityDB	.01
iBoxDB	.01
Strabon	.01
SisoDB	.00
Badger	.00
BergDB	.00
Cachelot.io	.00
Djondb	.00
Elliptics	.00
Heroic	.00
HyperLevelDB	.00
JasDB	.00
Manticore Search	.00
Nanolat	.00
Newts	.00
OrigoDB	.00
Resin Cache	.00
SiteWhere	.00
SwayDB	.00
TomP2P	.00
ToroDB	.00