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.

  • 1
    Google Cloud SQL
    Google Cloud SQL offers a fully-managed service for SQL databases, supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. It simplifies database administration by automating backup management, scaling, and security patches, allowing users to focus on their applications instead of infrastructure. With Google Cloud SQL, users can achieve high performance and reliability for SQL-based workloads with minimal effort. This service supports complex queries and data relationships, making it a great option for organizations that need robust SQL database solutions in the cloud. New customers also get $300 in free credits to explore and try Google Cloud SQL, helping them evaluate the service for their SQL database needs.
    Starting Price: Free ($300 in free credits)
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  • 2
    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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  • 3
    Percona Server for MySQL
    Percona Server for MySQL is a free, fully-compatible, enhanced, open source drop-in replacement for MySQL. It provides superior performance, scalability, and instrumentation. With over 5,300,000 downloads, Percona Server’s self-tuning algorithms and support for extremely high-performance hardware delivers excellent performance and reliability Percona Server for MySQL delivers enterprise-grade features and higher uptime, along with a number of key benefits that improve database performance and efficiency. It provides more time to focus on key priorities, as users need to spend less time on tuning and administering. Percona is a market leader in providing best-of-breed enterprise-class software, support, consulting, managed services, and training for on-premise and cloud-based open source databases. Percona was founded on the belief that everyone should have access to scalable, secure, efficient, and resilient database software features, without inflated fees or vendor lock-in.
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    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    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
  • 5
    SQL Server

    SQL Server

    Microsoft

    Intelligence and security are built into Microsoft SQL Server 2019. You get extras without extra cost, along with best-in-class performance and flexibility for your on-premises needs. Take advantage of the efficiency and agility of the cloud by easily migrating to the cloud without changing code. Unlock insights and make predictions faster with Azure. Develop using the technology of your choice, including open source, backed by Microsoft's innovations. Easily integrate data into your apps and use a rich set of cognitive services to build human-like intelligence across any scale of data. AI is native to the data platform—you can unlock insights faster from all your data, on-premises and in the cloud. Combine your unique enterprise data and the world's data to build an intelligence-driven organization. Work with a flexible data platform that gives you a consistent experience across platforms and gets your innovations to market faster—you can build your apps and then deploy anywhere.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 6
    Amazon Aurora
    Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones.
    Starting Price: $0.02 per month
  • 7
    SingleStore

    SingleStore

    SingleStore

    SingleStore (formerly MemSQL) is a distributed, highly-scalable SQL database that can run anywhere. We deliver maximum performance for transactional and analytical workloads with familiar relational models. SingleStore is a scalable SQL database that ingests data continuously to perform operational analytics for the front lines of your business. Ingest millions of events per second with ACID transactions while simultaneously analyzing billions of rows of data in relational SQL, JSON, geospatial, and full-text search formats. SingleStore delivers ultimate data ingestion performance at scale and supports built in batch loading and real time data pipelines. SingleStore lets you achieve ultra fast query response across both live and historical data using familiar ANSI SQL. Perform ad hoc analysis with business intelligence tools, run machine learning algorithms for real-time scoring, perform geoanalytic queries in real time.
    Starting Price: $0.69 per hour
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    CockroachDB

    CockroachDB

    Cockroach Labs

    CockroachDB: Cloud-native, distributed SQL. Your cloud applications deserve a cloud-native database. Cloud-based apps and services deserve a database that scales across clouds, eases operational complexity, and improves reliability. CockroachDB delivers resilient, distributed SQL with ACID transactions and data partitioned by location. Automate operations for mission-critical applications by pairing CockroachDB with orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Mesosphere DC/OS. Every node can service both reads and writes so that you can scale query throughput and database capacity by simply adding more endpoints. Just add new nodes to CockroachDB, and it automatically rebalances data, completely removing the pain of manual sharding. As demand shifts, CockroachDB detects hotspots and intelligently distributes data to maintain performance. Tune your database at the row level so that data lives close to your users and you can minimize query latency.
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    SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)
    Modernize and accelerate your transaction-based applications on premise and in the cloud with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE). This high-performance SQL database server uses a relational management model to meet rising demand for performance, reliability, and efficiency in every industry. Simplify operations and reduce costs with workload analyzer and workload profiler features for built-in high availability, disaster recovery, and resource optimization. Scale transactions, data, and users and improve performance with added technology options, such as MemScale and XOLTP. Discover how reducing overhead on production databases enables Q-Free employees to focus on innovation and value-adding work. Deploy on-premise and on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Deliver high performance and availability to process mission-critical transactions.
  • 10
    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
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    IBM Db2
    IBM Db2 is a family of data management products, including the Db2 relational database. The products feature AI-powered capabilities to help you modernize the management of both structured and unstructured data across on-premises and multicloud environments. By helping to make your data simple and accessible, the Db2 family positions your business to pursue the value of AI. Most of the Db2 family is available on the IBM Cloud Pak® for Data platform, either as an add-on or an included data source service, making virtually all of your data available across hybrid or multicloud environments to fuel your AI applications. Easily converge your transactional data stores and rapidly derive insights through universal, intelligent querying of data across disparate sources. Cut costs with the multimodel capability that eliminates the need for data replication and migration. Enhance agility by running Db2 on any cloud vendor.
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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
  • 14
    NuoDB

    NuoDB

    NuoDB

    The world is moving to distributed applications and architectures, and your database should too. Learn how you can deploy where you want, when you want, and how you want with a distributed SQL database. Migrate existing SQL applications to a distributed, multi-node architecture that can dynamically scale out and in. Our Transaction Engines (TEs) and Storage Managers (SMs) work together to ensure ACID compliance across multiple nodes. Deploy in a distributed architecture. When you deploy your database with multiple nodes, the loss of one or multiple nodes will not result in the loss of database access. Deploy TEs and SMs to meet your variable workload needs, or deploy in the different environments the teams in your organization uses: in private and public clouds, in hybrid environments, and across clouds.
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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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    MonetDB

    MonetDB

    MonetDB

    Choose from a wide range of SQL features to realise your applications from pure analytics to hybrid transactional/analytical processing. When you're curious about what's in your data; when you want to work efficiently; when your deadline is closing: MonetDB returns query result in mere seconds or even less. When you want to (re)use your own code; when you need specialised functions: use the hooks to add your own user-defined functions in SQL, Python, R or C/C++. Join us and expand the MonetDB community spread over 130+ countries with students, teachers, researchers, start-ups, small businesses and multinational enterprises. Join the leading Database in Analytical Jobs and surf the innovation! Don’t lose time with complex installation, use MonetDB’s easy setup to get your DBMS up and running quickly.
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    PostgreSQL

    PostgreSQL

    PostgreSQL Global Development Group

    PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance. There is a wealth of information to be found describing how to install and use PostgreSQL through the official documentation. The open-source community provides many helpful places to become familiar with PostgreSQL, discover how it works, and find career opportunities. Learm more on how to engage with the community. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of PostgreSQL, including 15.1, 14.6, 13.9, 12.13, 11.18, and 10.23. This release fixes 25 bugs reported over the last several months. This is the final release of PostgreSQL 10. PostgreSQL 10 will no longer receive security and bug fixes. If you are running PostgreSQL 10 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade.
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    SAP MaxDB
    SAP® MaxDB™ is the database management system developed and supported by SAP SE. SAP MaxDB™ is SAP's own database. It is specifically designed to provide lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for SAP applications. SAP solutions use SAP MaxDB to store both application logic and business data. The database is a central component of any SAP solution installation and provides the basis for its reliability. Information about creating and configuring a database, monitoring, backing up and recovering data, exporting and importing data, managing users, analyzing database performance, using SQL optimizer, searching for errors, developing database applications and further activities. Tools integrated in the Computing Centre Management System (CCMS) for analyzing a SAP MaxDB database, scheduling actions and monitoring the database functions and alerts. Command line tool for database administration.
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    MariaDB

    MariaDB

    MariaDB

    MariaDB Platform is a complete enterprise open source database solution. It has the versatility to support transactional, analytical and hybrid workloads as well as relational, JSON and hybrid data models. And it has the scalability to grow from standalone databases and data warehouses to fully distributed SQL for executing millions of transactions per second and performing interactive, ad hoc analytics on billions of rows. MariaDB can be deployed on prem on commodity hardware, is available on all major public clouds and through MariaDB SkySQL as a fully managed cloud database. To learn more, visit mariadb.com.
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    Oracle Database
    Oracle database products offer customers cost-optimized and high-performance versions of Oracle Database, the world's leading converged, multi-model database management system, as well as in-memory, NoSQL, and MySQL databases. Oracle Autonomous Database, available on-premises via Oracle Cloud@Customer or in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enables customers to simplify relational database environments and reduce management workloads. Oracle Autonomous Database eliminates the complexity of operating and securing Oracle Database while giving customers the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability. Oracle Database can be deployed on-premises when customers have data residency and network latency concerns. Customers with applications that are dependent on specific Oracle database versions have complete control over the versions they run and when those versions change.
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    Altibase

    Altibase

    Altibase

    Altibase is an enterprise-grade, high-performance and relational open source database. A single database that delivers high-intensity data processing through an in-memory database portion and large storage capacity through an on-disk database portion. 10 times faster than conventional on-disk databases. Clients have consistently chosen Altibase over Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and others. Altibase has replaced many traditional on-disk databases in various industries that require real time solutions since 1999. Altibase now has over 650 global enterprise clients including 8 Fortune Global 500 companies with thousands of mission-critical deployments worldwide. Product maturity rich with function and feature. Altibase is open source which includes its cutting-edge scale-out technology, sharding. No license costs with flexible and competitive subscription fees. 20 years’ accumulated know-how of dealing with over 6,000 mission-critical use cases.
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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.
  • 24
    Apache Derby
    Apache Derby, an Apache DB subproject, is an open source relational database implemented entirely in Java and available under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Derby has a small footprint - about 3.5 megabytes for the base engine and embedded JDBC driver. Derby provides an embedded JDBC driver that lets you embed Derby in any Java-based solution. Derby also supports the more familiar client/server mode with the Derby Network Client JDBC driver and Derby Network Server.
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