Database Flow is a modern, Open Source, self-hosted, web-based tool for working with SQL databases and GraphQL APIs. It supports a variety of the database engines: IBM DB2, Oracle, H2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server. It features an advanced SQL editor, query plan analyzer, GraphQL client, schema explorer, charting, query history, and more.
The only visible downside so far is that it’s written in Java.
DB-Engines.com provides some insight into some of the most popular database engines (312 of them to be precise). Â Nothing too surprising there – Oracle and MySQL leading the charts, but it’s nice to have the numbers and trends.
There are, of course, many different ways how the popularity can be calculated. Â 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.
It’s a well known fact that I am not the greatest fan of Microsoft and their technologies. Â I’ve been bitten many a time through the years. Â And not even them becoming a Platinum Partner in the Linux Foundation can change my attitude towards them. Â It’s just been too much pain, and scars, and tears, and sweat.
But the way life is, once in a while, I just have to work with or around them. Â Recently, for example, at work, we’ve done a project that just had to use MS SQL Server and there was no way to get around it. Â Gladly, I managed to find just the right image on the Amazon AWS Marketplace, and spin a new EC2 instance for testing. Â The local development was difficult, but at least we had a place to test stuff before sending it off to the customer.
If such a need arises in the future, I think I’ll give the MS SQL for Linux a try. Â And that’s when this article from Fedora Magazine might come in handy. Â MS SQL + Docker + Fedora. Â Hmm.