Compare the Top SQL Databases as of April 2025

What are SQL Databases?

SQL databases are structured systems that use the Structured Query Language (SQL) to store, retrieve, and manage data. They organize data into tables with rows and columns, ensuring that information is easily accessible, consistent, and scalable. SQL databases are widely used in applications that require complex queries, transactions, and data integrity, making them essential for web applications, financial systems, and enterprise environments. These databases offer robust features for security, data normalization, and maintaining relationships between different datasets. Overall, SQL databases are fundamental to managing relational data efficiently and reliably across various industries. Compare and read user reviews of the best SQL Databases currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

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    RaimaDB

    RaimaDB

    Raima

    RaimaDB is an embedded time series database for IoT and Edge devices that can run in-memory. It is an extremely powerful, lightweight and secure RDBMS. Field tested by over 20 000 developers worldwide and has more than 25 000 000 deployments. RaimaDB is a high-performance, cross-platform embedded database designed for mission-critical applications, particularly in the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing markets. It offers a small footprint, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments, and supports both in-memory and persistent storage configurations. RaimaDB provides developers with multiple data modeling options, including traditional relational models and direct relationships through network model sets. It ensures data integrity with ACID-compliant transactions and supports various indexing methods such as B+Tree, Hash Table, R-Tree, and AVL-Tree.
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  • 2
    SQLite

    SQLite

    SQLite

    SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. SQLite is built into all mobile phones and most computers and comes bundled inside countless other applications that people use every day. SQLite is an in-process library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. The code for SQLite is in the public domain and is thus free for use for any purpose, commercial or private. SQLite is the most widely deployed database in the world with more applications than we can count, including several high-profile projects.
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    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    MySQL

    MySQL

    Oracle

    MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. With its proven performance, reliability, and ease-of-use, MySQL has become the leading database choice for web-based applications, used by high profile web properties including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all five of the top five websites*. Additionally, it is an extremely popular choice as embedded database, distributed by thousands of ISVs and OEMs.
    Starting Price: Free
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    eXtremeDB

    eXtremeDB

    McObject

    How is platform independent eXtremeDB different? - Hybrid data storage. Unlike other IMDS, eXtremeDB can be all-in-memory, all-persistent, or have a mix of in-memory tables and persistent tables - Active Replication Fabric™ is unique to eXtremeDB, offering bidirectional replication, multi-tier replication (e.g. edge-to-gateway-to-gateway-to-cloud), compression to maximize limited bandwidth networks and more - Row & Columnar Flexibility for Time Series Data supports database designs that combine row-based and column-based layouts, in order to best leverage the CPU cache speed - Embedded and Client/Server. Fast, flexible eXtremeDB is data management wherever you need it, and can be deployed as an embedded database system, and/or as a client/server database system -A hard real-time deterministic option in eXtremeDB/rt Designed for use in resource-constrained, mission-critical embedded systems. Found in everything from routers to satellites to trains to stock markets worldwide
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    VistaDB

    VistaDB

    VistaDB

    Microsoft has worked hard to make .NET and SQL Server a powerful combination and VistaDB brings that capability to a small, easy-to-deploy package. The VistaDB engine is a single, small managed assembly you deploy with your app and each database is a single file. Using Xamarin, you can fit a full RDBMS on your phone. VistaDB is a fully compliant ADO.NET data provider with support for Entity Framework, ADO.NET, and Typed Datasets as well as its own direct data access API for efficient cursor-based operations. Thanks to ADO.NET, VistaDB is already compatible with a wide range of third-party ORMs, reporting systems, and more. VistaDB fully supports the ADO.NET provider factory model allowing you to write one codebase that can target either VistaDB or SQL Server at runtime. Think of all the things built on top of ADO.NET, not just your application but reporting systems, ORMs, and other data-driven libraries for .NET.
    Starting Price: $1,595 per year
  • 6
    Firebird

    Firebird

    Firebird Foundation

    Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981. The Firebird Project is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000. The Firebird Project supplies users, developers, and administrators with various kinds of documentation, from Quick Start guides to expert-level articles devoted to various aspects of Firebird.
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    CUBRID

    CUBRID

    CUBRID

    CUBRID is a relational DBMS optimized for online transaction processing (OLTP) that complies with ANSI SQL standards and provides MVCC support, High-Availability (HA) capabilities, and GUI-based tools for DB management/migration. It also provides Oracle/MySQL compatibility and supports a variety of interfaces, including JDBC. CUBRID provides ease of installation and native GUI-based administration tools for developers' convenience. Multi-threaded, multi-server architecture, native broker middleware, cost-based optimizer, and intensive caching techniques for your OLTP services. Very accurate predictable automatic fail-over built-in technology, based on the CUBRID Heartbeat native engine core. Multi-volume support, automatic volume expansion, and unlimited number and size of databases/ tables/indexes.
    Starting Price: $0.01/one-time/user
  • 8
    Actian Zen
    Actian Zen is an embedded, high-performance, and low-maintenance database management system designed for edge applications, mobile devices, and IoT environments. It offers a seamless integration of SQL and NoSQL data models, providing flexibility for developers working with structured and unstructured data. Actian Zen is known for its small footprint, scalability, and high reliability, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments where consistent performance and minimal administrative overhead are essential. With built-in security features and a self-tuning architecture, it supports real-time data processing and analytics without the need for constant monitoring or maintenance. Actian Zen is widely used in industries like healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, where edge computing and distributed data environments are critical for business operations.
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    Tarantool

    Tarantool

    Tarantool

    Corporations need a way to ensure uninterrupted operation of their systems, high speed of data processing, and reliability of storage. The in-memory technologies have proven themselves well in solving these problems. For more than 10 years, Tarantool has been helping companies all over the world build smart caches, data marts, and golden client profiles while saving server capacity. Reduce the cost of storing credentials compared to siloed solutions and improve the service and security of client applications. Reduce data management costs of maintaining a large number of disparate systems that store customer identities. Increase sales by improving the speed and quality of customer recommendations for goods or services through the analysis of user behavior and user data. Improve mobile and web channel service by accelerating frontends to reduce user outflow. IT systems of large organizations operate in a closed loop of a local network, where data circulates unprotected.
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    Mimer SQL
    The Mimer SQL codebase is the most modern in the world. It is modular, extremely maintainable, easily expandable, and designed with portability in mind. We know how to squeeze out the best from computers and operating systems, and so does Mimer SQL. Our brand new SQL compiler with the latest in optimization techniques, coupled with a world-class storage engine and no limits besides what the hardware imposes, lays the groundwork for speed and efficiency that is second to none. Continuously improved and refined, the security features of Mimer SQL leave nothing wanting. Data in use, data in motion, and data at rest are all covered with time-tested, reliable, and documented algorithms. Mimer SQL is the ideal companion for the modern in-vehicle computation solution. Its performance and reliability match the hard demands of secure, flexible, and reliable data management in today’s autonomous and connected cars.
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    Apache Phoenix

    Apache Phoenix

    Apache Software Foundation

    Apache Phoenix enables OLTP and operational analytics in Hadoop for low-latency applications by combining the best of both worlds. The power of standard SQL and JDBC APIs with full ACID transaction capabilities and the flexibility of late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities from the NoSQL world by leveraging HBase as its backing store. Apache Phoenix is fully integrated with other Hadoop products such as Spark, Hive, Pig, Flume, and Map Reduce. Become the trusted data platform for OLTP and operational analytics for Hadoop through well-defined, industry-standard APIs. Apache Phoenix takes your SQL query, compiles it into a series of HBase scans, and orchestrates the running of those scans to produce regular JDBC result sets. Direct use of the HBase API, along with coprocessors and custom filters, results in performance on the order of milliseconds for small queries, or seconds for tens of millions of rows.
    Starting Price: Free
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    SAP HANA
    SAP HANA in-memory database is for transactional and analytical workloads with any data type — on a single data copy. It breaks down the transactional and analytical silos in organizations, for quick decision-making, on premise and in the cloud. Innovate without boundaries on a database management system, where you can develop intelligent and live solutions for quick decision-making on a single data copy. And with advanced analytics, you can support next-generation transactional processing. Build data solutions with cloud-native scalability, speed, and performance. With the SAP HANA Cloud database, you can gain trusted, business-ready information from a single solution, while enabling security, privacy, and anonymization with proven enterprise reliability. An intelligent enterprise runs on insight from data – and more than ever, this insight must be delivered in real time.
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    Oracle TimesTen
    Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database (TimesTen) delivers real time application performance (low response time and high throughput) by changing the assumptions around where data resides at runtime. By managing data in memory, and optimizing data structures and access algorithms accordingly, database operations execute with maximum efficiency achieving dramatic gains in responsiveness and throughput. With the introduction of TimesTen Scaleout, a shared nothing scale-out architecture based on the existing in-memory technology, TimesTen allows databases to transparently scale across dozens of hosts, reach hundreds of terabytes in size and support hundreds of millions of transactions per second without the need for manual database sharding or workload partitioning.
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    HyperSQL DataBase

    HyperSQL DataBase

    The hsql Development Group

    HSQLDB (HyperSQL DataBase) is the leading SQL relational database system written in Java. It offers a small, fast multithreaded and transactional database engine with in-memory and disk-based tables and supports embedded and server modes. It includes a powerful command line SQL tool and simple GUI query tools. HSQLDB supports the widest range of SQL Standard features seen in any open source database engine: SQL:2016 core language features and an extensive list of SQL:2016 optional features. It supports full Advanced ANSI-92 SQL with only two exceptions. Many extensions to the Standard, including syntax compatibility modes and features of other popular database engines, are also supported.
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    InterBase

    InterBase

    Embarcadero

    Ultrafast, scalable, embeddable SQL database with commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery, and change synchronization. Cross-platform, zero-install, embedded database as a direct-access library. Cross-platform, zero-install, embedded database with database-level and column-level AES and DES encryption. Concurrent applications/client access to the database on Windows with database-level and column-level AES and DES encryption. Ultrafast, scalable, SQL server database for Windows and Linux with commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery and change synchronization. Attacks on databases and loss of data can be costly and lead to loss of customers’ trust (and business), regulatory action, and heavy fines. InterBase provides over-the-wire and at-rest encryption, separate security login, and role-based user security. InterBase maintains full on-disk encryption while adding negligible overhead to database speed and performance.
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    H2

    H2

    H2

    Welcome to H2, the Java SQL database. In embedded mode, an application opens a database from within the same JVM using JDBC. This is the fastest and easiest connection mode. The disadvantage is that a database may only be open in one virtual machine (and class loader) at any time. As in all modes, both persistent and in-memory databases are supported. There is no limit on the number of database open concurrently, or on the number of open connections. The mixed mode is a combination of the embedded and the server mode. The first application that connects to a database does that in embedded mode, but also starts a server so that other applications (running in different processes or virtual machines) can concurrently access the same data. The local connections are as fast as if the database is used in just the embedded mode, while the remote connections are a bit slower.
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