Oracle was 2015's most popular database server

Oracle's database management system saw the biggest rise in terms of popularity in the past year, according to DB-Engines, a website that has specialized in ranking database engines for the past few years.

By Catalin Cimpanu , http://news.softpedia.com/

Using an internal scoring system, DB-Engines reports that Oracle's database system has gained 56.9 points from its January 2015 ranking.

Oracle, which also led the Top 10 database leaderboard all year, had a very successful year, after oscillating up and down the ranking in the past.

Oracle didn't only see a rise in the number of deployed instances, job offerings, and mentions on LinkedIn profiles, but for the first time, it also became a popular topic on Twitter and a constant mention on StackOverflow, a famous Q&A support forum for developers.

MongoDB, last year's winner, came second

Second on DB-Engine's popularity list was MongoDB, which barely missed winning the DBMS of the Year award for the third time in a row, tallying only 55.1 points, compared to January 2015.

But there is good news for MongoDB fans as well, with the database overtaking PostgreSQL and moving up in DB-Engine's regular monthly rankings, advancing to the fourth position after being ranked fifth at the start of 2015.

Third on the popularity list came in Cassandra, a wide column store data storage platform, initially created by Facebook and now developed by the Apache Software Foundation.

NoSQL not a fad, it never was

Looking back, 2015 will be remembered as the year when the line between RDBMS (relational databases) and NoSQL systems finally blurred.

In 2015, PostgreSQL began working on more NoSQL features while Couchbase started adding support for an SQL-like query language to its NoSQL database server.

As for the NoSQL hype, industry experts like Paul Andlinger and Matthias Gelbmann from DB-Engines don't think it will go away pretty soon.

"Considering the number of projects that use NoSQL systems nowadays, many of them very complex and mission-critical," the two commented, "it is not justified to call it a hype, probably never was."