Best Relational Database Management Systems

PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short is a widely popular, free and open-source relational database management system. PostgreSQL is available for all major operating systems including macOS, Linux, Windows, BSD and Solaris. The project has been in active development for over 30 years now, and powers many of the applications you use on a daily basis.

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SQLite is a free and open-source relational database management system that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. Rather than being a typical client–server database engine, SQLite is self-contained and can be embedded into applications. Making it perfect for development frameworks that want to provide a default database without setup, or applications that needs an embedded database. SQLite is built into all mobile operating systems and most computers and comes bundled with a countless applications. SQLite is also ACID-compliant and implements most of the SQL standard, generally following PostgreSQL syntax.

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MariaDB is an free and open-source, community-developed relational database management system. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, and is developed and maintained by the creators of MySQL, after concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009. The databases comes bundled by default with most Linux distributions and is also apart of most cloud offerings. MariaDB is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness which is ensured through the MariaDB Foundation.

Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft. The database uses Transact-SQL, or T-SQL, the Microsoft's implementation of SQL that adds a set of proprietary programming constructs. Microsoft SQL server are used by enterprise-scale companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Thermo Fisher Scientific and CDK Global for finance, manufacturing and business service applications. Microsoft SQL server is also released as a free version under the name Microsoft SQL Server Express.

The worlds most popular free open-source relational database, MySQL is used by 150,000 + companies across the globe. The relational database management system is released and distributed under the GPL license and openly developed by the community. MySQL uses SQL as its query language and is fully integrated and ACID compliant.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Amazon Redshift is the world's fastest cloud data warehouse and gets faster with every update. It database supports the latest RA3 instances with managed storage that allow you to automatically scale data warehouse storage capacity without adding any additional compute resources. Giving you a 3x performance boost when compared to other cloud data warehouse.

IBM DB2 is an enterpise-class relational database management system. IBM DB2 is built for mission critical workloads and provides advanced features like adaptive workload management, time travel query, query federation, in-database AI, row/column access control, auditing, and support for JSON, XML, and geospatial data sets. IBM DB2 is used by fortune-500 companies like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

ArangoDB is a database system that was designed to support key/value, document, and graph data to be stored together, and queried via a unified language called AQL. The project is developed by ArangoDB GmbH, and released free and open-source under the Apache License 2.0. The universal "native multi-level" design of the database allows for a flexible approach when structuring and building an application, a feature that many have come to love.