Best Free SQL Databases

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. With its proven performance, reliability, and ease-of-use, MySQL has become the leading database choice for web-based applications, used by high profile web properties including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all five of the top five websites*. Additionally, it is an extremely popular choice as embedded database, distributed by thousands of ISVs and OEMs.

Apache Phoenix enables OLTP and operational analytics in Hadoop for low-latency applications by combining the best of both worlds. The power of standard SQL and JDBC APIs with full ACID transaction capabilities and the flexibility of late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities from the NoSQL world by leveraging HBase as its backing store. Apache Phoenix is fully integrated with other Hadoop products such as Spark, Hive, Pig, Flume, and Map Reduce. Become the trusted data platform for OLTP and operational analytics for Hadoop through well-defined, industry-standard APIs. Apache Phoenix takes your SQL query, compiles it into a series of HBase scans, and orchestrates the running of those scans to produce regular JDBC result sets. Direct use of the HBase API, along with coprocessors and custom filters, results in performance on the order of milliseconds for small queries, or seconds for tens of millions of rows.

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981. The Firebird Project is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000. The Firebird Project supplies users, developers, and administrators with various kinds of documentation, from Quick Start guides to expert-level articles devoted to various aspects of Firebird.

SAP HANA in-memory database is for transactional and analytical workloads with any data type — on a single data copy. It breaks down the transactional and analytical silos in organizations, for quick decision-making, on premise and in the cloud. Innovate without boundaries on a database management system, where you can develop intelligent and live solutions for quick decision-making on a single data copy. And with advanced analytics, you can support next-generation transactional processing. Build data solutions with cloud-native scalability, speed, and performance. With the SAP HANA Cloud database, you can gain trusted, business-ready information from a single solution, while enabling security, privacy, and anonymization with proven enterprise reliability. An intelligent enterprise runs on insight from data – and more than ever, this insight must be delivered in real time.

Ultrafast, scalable, embeddable SQL database with commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery, and change synchronization. Cross-platform, zero-install, embedded database as a direct-access library. Cross-platform, zero-install, embedded database with database-level and column-level AES and DES encryption. Concurrent applications/client access to the database on Windows with database-level and column-level AES and DES encryption. Ultrafast, scalable, SQL server database for Windows and Linux with commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery and change synchronization. Attacks on databases and loss of data can be costly and lead to loss of customers’ trust (and business), regulatory action, and heavy fines. InterBase provides over-the-wire and at-rest encryption, separate security login, and role-based user security. InterBase maintains full on-disk encryption while adding negligible overhead to database speed and performance.