Data is the most valuable and important thing in this 21′ st century. This virtual world is completely built and running with numerous amount of data. Without proper management of this huge amount of data, every single system would get crashed and broke-down. Now here comes the savior, a software that stores, organizes, and manages a large amount of information, the database management system.
A database management system interacts with end-users and applications, to capture and analyze the data and provide a disciplined approach to make data management much easier. Due to the rapid growth in technology throughout the World, the demand for open-source and database is rising day-by-day. Below in this article, there are the top five most popular open-source databases which are absolutely free and you can implement them in any computing platforms like Windows, Mac, or Linux.
1. MySQL
It is a cross-platformed, leading open source and free relational database management system which is dominating the software industry for the past 25 years. It is one of the most successful open-source projects with its current stable version 8.0. According to StackOverflow’s developer survey, it maintained the top spot among other DBMS. MySQL was developed by Oracle Corporation and written in C and C++ with an enormous amount of support and documentation. MySQL is used by almost every major tech giants like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
- It is super fast and easy to use,
- High performance for large databases (more than 50 million rows in a table),
- It is highly scalable and has Multiple storage engines like InnoDB, CSV, NDB, etc to store data,
- it runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and a wide range of UNIX variants.
- It is highly secure,
- It supports SQL and ODBC interface Connector
Most Useful for: MySQL is most useful for high volume websites, packaged software, and business-critical systems.
2. PostgreSQL
It is a powerful, Most Advanced open source object-relational database system with over 20 years of active development with a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It is written in C and was developed by PostgreSQL Global Development Group and operates in most Unix OS, Windows, and several other systems. Many tech giants like Apple, Cisco, Skype, and IMDb uses PostgreSQL.
- It is highly scalable with sophisticated locking mechanism
- It has a number of user interfaces and predefined functions
- Supports JSON which is used to get linked to other data storages
- Mature server-side programming functionality
- Supports concurrency control to multiple levels(Multi-version concurrency control).
Most Useful for: PostgreSQL is a Highly reliable RDBMS with almost zero data scaling issues is most useful in banking and product-based industries.
3. SQLite
SQLite is a C-language library that implements a lightweight, highly-reliable, and full-featured, SQL database engine. It is a cross-platformed, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine which most widely deployed database in the world free for use for any purpose, commercial or private. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine.
- Lightweight and Easy to Implement,
- Always Ready to Use without installation or configuration,
- No need of any dedicated servers to store database everything gets stored in the hard disk,
- Very Portable due to file-based system,
- Highly compatible with nearly all programming languages
Most Useful for: SQLiten is best suited for small-scale testing and development purposes which don’t require so many features.
4. MongoDB
In this Cloud era, MongoDB is a general-purpose, document-based, distributed database built for modern application and Used by millions of developers for the world’s most innovative products and services. MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents which is much more expressive and powerful than the traditional row-column model. Though MongoDB is a NoSQL database it has all the power of a relational database and even more. It has a powerful query language that allows you to filter and sort by any field, no matter how nested it may be within a document. It also supports aggregations and other modern use-cases such as geo-based search, graph search, and text search.
- Scale, provision and manage complex multi-node clusters easily with API calls
- Create distributed clusters globally to run your database on multiple clouds
- Provides fully automated continuous Cloud Backup for your data
- Performance optimization, On-Demand scaling, and real-time visibility into database metrics.
- Provides High-class security for your data with authentication, authorization, encryption, and more.
Most useful for: MongoDB is suitable for big data projects such as eCommerce business for product catalog, social networking sites, and high-speed logging and caching.
5. MariaDB
MariaDB Server is one of the most popular free open-source relational databases made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. It can be used for a wide variety of applications, from banking to websites with much-improved query optimizer and cutting edge features. There are dynamic columns in a table and the latest version supports JSON and GIS.
- Additional functionality than MySQL,
- Provides best data processing facilities,
- Cross-platformed supports numerous programming languages,
- Provides the Galera cluster technology,
- Quicker and more transparent security releases.
Most Useful for: It is most suitable for teams and freelancers with knowledge of querying language and programming skills.
If you are a developer you have to work with the database at some time during the development process. To perform management tasks with ease, a good Database Management Systems is very much important in every software industry for their rapid growth. Without a DBMS, we might have to do data management manually which is really a very hectic and nearly impossible task. Nowadays a lot of database management software is available in the market and every database management system has its pros and cons. So, it’s important to choose the perfect one wisely depending upon the company or your project requirements.
