Database Engines Ranking

db-engines-ranking-table

DB-Engines.com provides some insight into some of the most popular database engines (312 of them to be precise).  Nothing too surprising there – Oracle and MySQL leading the charts, but it’s nice to have the numbers and trends.

db-engines-ranking

There are, of course, many different ways how the popularity can be calculated.  Their method is based on the popularity of each engine in a variety of online outlets, from Google Search to social networks.

  • Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google, Bing and Yandex for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for <system name> together with the term database, e.g. “Oracle” and “database”.
  • General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.
  • Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.
  • Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.
  • Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional networks LinkedIn and Upwork.
  • Relevance in social networks. We count the number of Twitter tweets, in which the system is mentioned.

It seems objective and representative enough to me.

WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the Internet

wordpress-market-share

WordPress Tavern states:

WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the internet, up from 25% last year. While it may seem that WordPress is neatly adding 2% of the internet every year, its percentage increase fluctuates from year to year and the climb is getting more arduous with more weight to haul.

Linking to these statistics from W3Techs.  Impressive!

Those who think that WordPress is just a blogging system are far from the truth…

WordPress 4.7 Field Guide

WordPress 4.7 is just around the corner (this month).  Here is a field guide, detailing what are the changes (and there are plenty!) and what to pay attention to during and after upgrade of your site, as well as what plugin and theme developers should check for the maximum compatibility with the upcoming release.

WordPress 4.7 Field Guide

Holly Molly, that’s a lot of changes!

Over 447 bugs, 165 enhancements, 8 feature requests, and 15 blessed tasks have been marked as fixed in WordPress 4.7.

 

WordPress : Preferred Languages Research

Pascal Birchler of the WordPress blogs some interesting research he did in the area of handling preferred language and how different systems – ranging from browsers, wikis, and social networks to all kinds of content management systems – approach and solve the problem.

drupal-language-hierarchy-module

Drupal

Drupal 8 has a rather powerful user interface text language detection mechanism. There is a per session, per user and per browser option in the detection settings. However, users can only choose one language, so they cannot say (in core at least) that they want German primarily and Spanish if German is not available. But the language selected by the user is part of the larger fallback system, so it may fall back further down to other options.

The Language fallback module allows defining one fallback for a language, while the Language Hierarchy module provides a GUI to change the language fallback system. It allows setting up language hierarchies where translations of a site’s content, settings and interface can fall back to parent language translations, without ever falling back to English. This module might be the most interesting one for our research.

Apart from the research itself, I think this is an interesting example of how complex some seemingly simple features are.

Drupal and Playboy

https://twitter.com/vmbrasseur/status/804739968950104064

Slashdot has the details for the story, if you haven’t heard it yet.  Inappropriate? Maybe.  But then again, where do you draw the line of what’s inappropriate in the sponsor’s bag?  (Beer and other alcoholic beverages are very welcome, for example.)

I tend to take things on the lighter side, considering it to be somewhat entertaining and mildly funny.