Almost every web developer has a favorite database that he/she feels comfortable working with as all the tricks & gimmicks are already experienced.
It can be one of the popular databases below:
or even simpler ones like XML, text, etc.
It is understandable why these databases are frequently used; they are well-documented, have a community behind them, integrated with most popular CMSs', easy-to-use, offered by most of the hosting companies ,etc..
But there are also many
other databases which are getting popular day-by-day & may have advantages over what you're already using.
Here are
25+ open source alternative databases that you may consider using in your next project:
It is an
open source, high-performance, scalable, schema-free &
document-oriented (JSON-like data schemas) database.
There are ready to use drivers for most popular programming languages like PHP,Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, C++ + more.
Hypertable is a
high performance distributed data storage system designed to support applications requiring maximum performance, scalability, and reliability.
It is modeled after Google's BigTable and mostly focuses on large-scale datasets.
A
document-oriented database that can be
queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript.
CouchDB offers a
RESTful JSON API which can be accessed from any environment allowing HTTP requests
It is an embedded, disk-based, and f
ully transactional Java persistence engine that
stores data structured in graphs rather than tables.
Neo4j offer a
massive scalability. It can handle graphs of several billion nodes/relationships/properties on a single machine and can be scaled across multiple machines.
Riak is a very
ideal database for web applications as it combines:
- a decentralized key-value store
- a flexible map/reduce engine
- a friendly HTTP/JSON query interface.
It is an
embeddable database engine that provides developers with fast, reliable, local persistence with zero administration.
Oracle Berkeley DB is a library that links directly into your application & enables you to make simple function calls rather than sending messages to a remote server for a better performance.
Cassandra is a
highly scalable second-generation distributed database that is
used by giants like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Cisco & more..
It aims to provide a consistent, fault-tolerant & highly available environment for storing data.
Memcached is an
in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.
It is intended for use in
speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.
Firebird is a
relational database that can run on Linux, Windows & various UNIX platforms.
It offers high performance and powerful language support for
stored procedures and triggers.
Redis is an
advanced fast key-value database written in C which can be used like memcached, in front of a traditional database, or on its own.
It has support for many programming languages &
used by popular projects like GitHub or Engine Yard.
There is also a
PHP client named Rediska for managing
Redis databases.
HBase is a
distributed & column-oriented store which can also be called as the Hadoop database.
The project aims to host very large tables like "billions of rows, millions of columns".
It has a
REST-ful web service gateway that supports XML, Protobuf, and binary data encoding options.
It is a consistently replicated, fault-tolerant
key-value store that works in Windows OS.
Keyspace offers high availability by masking server/network failures & appearing as a single, highly available service.
4store is a
database storage and query engine that holds
RDF data.
It is written in ANSI C99, designed to run on UNIX-like systems & offers a high performance, scalable & stable platform.
MariaDB is a backward compatible, drop-in replacement branch of the MySQL® Database Server.
It
includes all major open source storage engines + the Maria storage engine.
It is a
fork of MySQL that focuses on being a reliable database
optimized for Cloud and Net applications.
It is a
SQL relational database engine written in
Java.
HyperSQL offers a
small & fast database engine which has in-memory and disk-based tables, supports embedded/server modes.
Also, it has tools such as a command line SQL tool & GUI query apps.
MonetDB is a database system
for high-performance applications in data mining, OLAP, GIS, XML Query, text & multimedia retrieval.
Others
