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Comment by hodgesrm | Hacker News Reader

> You have MySQL & MariaDB and PostgreSQL as the two main SQL platforms

Based on license revenue it's actually Oracle and MS SQL server by miles. They are currently #1 and #3 on DB-Engines.com. (https://db-engines.com/en/ranking) MySQL is #2. PostgreSQL is #4, though it's pretty far back from the first three.

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Maybe I'm confused, but ranking databases on license revenue will inevitably show that the databases that charge licenses are higher.

I mean PostgreSQL is open source, and required no license fee. I'm not sure that license revenue is a good comparison metric.

DBMS Engines uses a set of metrics that does not include revenue. See https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition for more. Oracle and MS SQL Server have consistently ranked highly there for many years.

You know MySQL, MariaDB, and Postgres don't have licensing costs, right?

Of course. I've worked in and around the OSS DBMS market for over a decade. But the numbers were really big. It seems to me that out of a 2015 US $30B DBMS market Oracle and MS were collecting something like US $29B. The rest of the market,which included products like MongoDB and Cassandra was close to a rounding error. (I don't have the Gartner report handy, sorry.)

It's popular on HN to focus on OSS products, but there's a very large proprietary RDBMS market measured both in terms of revenue as well as users. That's how Oracle and MS got to be the behemoths they are today.

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