3T Software Labs Tracks SQL / NoSQL Trends

November 6, 2020

In a 4-year longitudinal survey of over 18,000 data professionals, the “MongoDB Trends Report 2020” from 3T Software Labs points to the continued decline of SQL-only technologies and the comparatively faster move to the cloud for NoSQL than for relational systems.

Publishers of the report, 3T Software Labs - the makers of the leading MongoDB client tool, Studio 3T - note that the EU emerges as the global laggard when moving to cloud-based data management systems, possibly because of concerns about GDPR and privacy laws.

Growth of MongoDB Atlas - the cloud-hosted version of MongoDB - has accelerated in the last two years, as have other open-source NoSQL technologies such as Redis and Elasticsearch. While 30% of those surveyed report having all of their non-relational data on the cloud, only 20% are entrusting their full SQL data set to third party management.

Andrew Davidson, VP, Cloud Products at MongoDB, comments in the report on why NoSQL cloud systems might be racing ahead: “The biggest driver behind distributed databases like MongoDB is that they are better suited to the fundamental scale-out/distributed nature of the cloud — and as companies move, they are using this as the opportunity to totally migrate away from systems designed for scale-up, pre-cloud era.”

Pointing to the polyglot nature of today’s database systems, Matthias Gelbmann, Co-Founder of the world’s leading database tracker, DB-Engines, also comments in the report: “When it comes to SQL vs NoSQL, … we see more and more SQL systems also supporting non-relational data models. Of the SQL systems in the top 10 of our ranking [at DB-Engines], only SQLite is a pure relational system.”

When asked about reasons for delaying a move to the cloud, those in the US and Canada were more concerned about the danger of physical data breaches than about compliance with the law. But for European data wranglers, the threat of getting prosecuted is apparently more concerning than the threat of getting hacked.