What are SQL Databases?

SQL databases are structured systems that use the Structured Query Language (SQL) to store, retrieve, and manage data. They organize data into tables with rows and columns, ensuring that information is easily accessible, consistent, and scalable. SQL databases are widely used in applications that require complex queries, transactions, and data integrity, making them essential for web applications, financial systems, and enterprise environments. These databases offer robust features for security, data normalization, and maintaining relationships between different datasets. Overall, SQL databases are fundamental to managing relational data efficiently and reliably across various industries. Compare and read user reviews of the best SQL Databases currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Google Cloud SQL
    Google Cloud SQL offers a fully-managed service for SQL databases, supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. It simplifies database administration by automating backup management, scaling, and security patches, allowing users to focus on their applications instead of infrastructure. With Google Cloud SQL, users can achieve high performance and reliability for SQL-based workloads with minimal effort. This service supports complex queries and data relationships, making it a great option for organizations that need robust SQL database solutions in the cloud. New customers also get $300 in free credits to explore and try Google Cloud SQL, helping them evaluate the service for their SQL database needs.
    Starting Price: Free ($300 in free credits)
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  • 2
    Teradata VantageCloud
    Teradata VantageCloud is a cloud-native SQL database platform built for enterprise-scale analytics and data management. It supports ANSI SQL and delivers high-performance querying across structured and semi-structured data in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. VantageCloud combines traditional RDBMS capabilities with advanced analytics, AI/ML integration, and workload optimization. Its open architecture ensures compatibility with modern data tools and formats, reducing vendor lock-in. Ideal for organizations seeking a scalable, secure, and flexible SQL engine that powers complex analytics and operational intelligence.
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  • 3
    RaimaDB

    RaimaDB

    Raima

    RaimaDB is an embedded time series database for IoT and Edge devices that can run in-memory. It is an extremely powerful, lightweight and secure RDBMS. Field tested by over 20 000 developers worldwide and has more than 25 000 000 deployments. RaimaDB is a high-performance, cross-platform embedded database designed for mission-critical applications, particularly in the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing markets. It offers a small footprint, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments, and supports both in-memory and persistent storage configurations. RaimaDB provides developers with multiple data modeling options, including traditional relational models and direct relationships through network model sets. It ensures data integrity with ACID-compliant transactions and supports various indexing methods such as B+Tree, Hash Table, R-Tree, and AVL-Tree.
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  • 4
    MySQL

    MySQL

    Oracle

    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.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    SingleStore

    SingleStore

    SingleStore

    SingleStore (formerly MemSQL) is a distributed, highly-scalable SQL database that can run anywhere. We deliver maximum performance for transactional and analytical workloads with familiar relational models. SingleStore is a scalable SQL database that ingests data continuously to perform operational analytics for the front lines of your business. Ingest millions of events per second with ACID transactions while simultaneously analyzing billions of rows of data in relational SQL, JSON, geospatial, and full-text search formats. SingleStore delivers ultimate data ingestion performance at scale and supports built in batch loading and real time data pipelines. SingleStore lets you achieve ultra fast query response across both live and historical data using familiar ANSI SQL. Perform ad hoc analysis with business intelligence tools, run machine learning algorithms for real-time scoring, perform geoanalytic queries in real time.
    Starting Price: $0.69 per hour
  • 6
    CockroachDB

    CockroachDB

    Cockroach Labs

    CockroachDB: Cloud-native, distributed SQL. Your cloud applications deserve a cloud-native database. Cloud-based apps and services deserve a database that scales across clouds, eases operational complexity, and improves reliability. CockroachDB delivers resilient, distributed SQL with ACID transactions and data partitioned by location. Automate operations for mission-critical applications by pairing CockroachDB with orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Mesosphere DC/OS. Every node can service both reads and writes so that you can scale query throughput and database capacity by simply adding more endpoints. Just add new nodes to CockroachDB, and it automatically rebalances data, completely removing the pain of manual sharding. As demand shifts, CockroachDB detects hotspots and intelligently distributes data to maintain performance. Tune your database at the row level so that data lives close to your users and you can minimize query latency.
  • 7
    SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)
    Modernize and accelerate your transaction-based applications on premise and in the cloud with SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE). This high-performance SQL database server uses a relational management model to meet rising demand for performance, reliability, and efficiency in every industry. Simplify operations and reduce costs with workload analyzer and workload profiler features for built-in high availability, disaster recovery, and resource optimization. Scale transactions, data, and users and improve performance with added technology options, such as MemScale and XOLTP. Discover how reducing overhead on production databases enables Q-Free employees to focus on innovation and value-adding work. Deploy on-premise and on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Deliver high performance and availability to process mission-critical transactions.
  • 8
    Firebird

    Firebird

    Firebird Foundation

    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.
  • 9
    NuoDB

    NuoDB

    NuoDB

    The world is moving to distributed applications and architectures, and your database should too. Learn how you can deploy where you want, when you want, and how you want with a distributed SQL database. Migrate existing SQL applications to a distributed, multi-node architecture that can dynamically scale out and in. Our Transaction Engines (TEs) and Storage Managers (SMs) work together to ensure ACID compliance across multiple nodes. Deploy in a distributed architecture. When you deploy your database with multiple nodes, the loss of one or multiple nodes will not result in the loss of database access. Deploy TEs and SMs to meet your variable workload needs, or deploy in the different environments the teams in your organization uses: in private and public clouds, in hybrid environments, and across clouds.
  • 10
    SAP HANA
    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.
  • 11
    VoltDB

    VoltDB

    VoltDB

    Volt Active Data is a data platform built to make your entire tech stack leaner, faster, and less expensive, so that your applications (and your company) can scale seamlessly to meet the ultra-low latency SLAs of 5G, IoT, edge computing, and whatever comes next. Designed to augment your existing big data investments, such as NoSQL, Hadoop, Kubernetes, Kafka, and traditional databases or data warehouses, Volt Active Data replaces the various layers typically required to make contextual decisions on streaming data with a single, unified layer that can handle ingest to action in less than 10 milliseconds. The world is full of data that’s generated, stored, forgotten, and then deleted. “Active Data” is data that needs to be acted on immediately to gain business value from it. There are lots of traditional and NoSQL data storage products that you can use to keep such data. There’s also data that you can make money from, if only you can act on it fast enough to ‘influence the moment’.
  • 12
    Altibase

    Altibase

    Altibase

    Altibase is an enterprise-grade, high-performance and relational open source database. A single database that delivers high-intensity data processing through an in-memory database portion and large storage capacity through an on-disk database portion. 10 times faster than conventional on-disk databases. Clients have consistently chosen Altibase over Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and others. Altibase has replaced many traditional on-disk databases in various industries that require real time solutions since 1999. Altibase now has over 650 global enterprise clients including 8 Fortune Global 500 companies with thousands of mission-critical deployments worldwide. Product maturity rich with function and feature. Altibase is open source which includes its cutting-edge scale-out technology, sharding. No license costs with flexible and competitive subscription fees. 20 years’ accumulated know-how of dealing with over 6,000 mission-critical use cases.
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    SAP MaxDB
    SAP® MaxDB™ is the database management system developed and supported by SAP SE. SAP MaxDB™ is SAP's own database. It is specifically designed to provide lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for SAP applications. SAP solutions use SAP MaxDB to store both application logic and business data. The database is a central component of any SAP solution installation and provides the basis for its reliability. Information about creating and configuring a database, monitoring, backing up and recovering data, exporting and importing data, managing users, analyzing database performance, using SQL optimizer, searching for errors, developing database applications and further activities. Tools integrated in the Computing Centre Management System (CCMS) for analyzing a SAP MaxDB database, scheduling actions and monitoring the database functions and alerts. Command line tool for database administration.
  • 14
    Oracle Database
    Oracle database products offer customers cost-optimized and high-performance versions of Oracle Database, the world's leading converged, multi-model database management system, as well as in-memory, NoSQL, and MySQL databases. Oracle Autonomous Database, available on-premises via Oracle Cloud@Customer or in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enables customers to simplify relational database environments and reduce management workloads. Oracle Autonomous Database eliminates the complexity of operating and securing Oracle Database while giving customers the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability. Oracle Database can be deployed on-premises when customers have data residency and network latency concerns. Customers with applications that are dependent on specific Oracle database versions have complete control over the versions they run and when those versions change.
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