COVID-19’s Impact on Open-source Databases and Domestic Databases

4 min readNov 9, 2020

By Shawn W. Xiao

Have you checked out the DB-Engines ranking of databases by popularity for May 2020? Although, the top 10 remained the same, but a closer look at May’s list reveals the followings:

Oracle was almost the same as last month, registering a slight increase of 0.02 points.
MySQL grew significantly by 14.29 points, nearly 66% higher than its growth of 8.62 points in April.
Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access continued to fall, by 5.12 points and 2.02 points, respectively.
IBM’s Db2 also dropped by 2.99 points.

As Long-established commercial databases stretch thin by the global impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, PostgreSQL reversed the decline of last month and recorded a growth of 4.95 points in the month of May. Under the pandemic-clouded economic situation, open-source databases seemed to have withstood the pressure.

With the COVID-19 pandemic running rampant outside of China in the past month, more than 5.11 million cases have been confirmed, with more than 330,000 deaths cumulatively. The global economy was hit hard by the disease. Unexpected situations kept emerging, and technology and employment have been impacted as well.

The public version of Oracle Database 20c was originally scheduled for release before the end of April, but now this plan has been postponed. Nevertheless, the Oracle 20.3 update is available on the cloud. Although it is not visible to most of us, the fact is that Oracle has been quietly updated to its .3 version since 20.1, following its new version policy.

The MySQL 8.0.20 GA version was officially released on April 27. In addition to bug fixes, it also added the SHOW_ROUTINE permission, improved the hash join algorithm, and introduced new features including the new index-level optimizer hints, Performance Schema improvement, X Plugin improvement, InnoDB improvement, and binary log transaction compression. The power of open source can never be underestimated.

Now let’s take a look at the rankings of Chinese databases. The top 10 Chinese databases are shown in the following figure. Apsara PolarDB, a cloud-native database developed by Alibaba Cloud, moved steadily upward in score month-on-month, becoming an important player in domestic databases.

The thriving domestic databases even amid the COVID-19 pandemic can be attributed to the drive of new infrastructure. As an important part of “new infrastructure”, the information technology application and innovation industry, including the 5G network and data center, has been gaining momentum. The domestic digital ecosystem construction will also speed up, and databases, especially domestic ones, will embrace new opportunities for growth and development.

The improving domestic pandemic prevention and control situation has accelerated the recovery of production and lifestyle activities, allowing us to rediscover our passion for life and use data to create a beautiful world.