The Rise & Fall of Databases: What 18 Years of Hacker News Reveals About Developer Mindshare

July 02, 2025

How the analysis was done

I used camelAI with a ClickHouse database of every HN story to do all analysis. You can use it for free with no login here to explore the data interactively yourself.

18 years • 1.8 million headlines • 13 database engines

Hacker News is a real-time barometer of developer excitement. I mined every story title from February 2007 to June 2025 and asked three questions:

How has headline volume for each database changed over time?
Which engines are accelerating the fastest right now?
Which ones are losing steam?

1 · Raw popularity through time

The chart below shows monthly headline counts for the eight most-talked-about engines, plus DuckDB (small base, big growth).

Click on the individual database names to toggle their visibility. Double click to isolate a single database.

PostgreSQL’s curve is a near-monotonic climb; by 2020 it dwarfs every other line. MySQL dominates the pre-2012 era, then flat-lines. MongoDB peaks around 2013, then slips as SQL engines add JSON support. ClickHouse (2016) and DuckDB (2020) rocket up in the analytics renaissance. Redis & SQLite are steady, underscoring their “invisible infrastructure” roles.

2 · Who’s gaining the fastest?

I compared the last 12 months (Jul 2024 – Jun 2025) with the previous 12 months, then fit a linear regression over the last 36 months to capture trajectory.

Engine	Headlines 2024-25	2023-24	YoY Δ %	3-yr slope (mentions / mo)
DuckDB	225	149	+50.7 %	+0.44
ClickHouse	211	170	+24.1 %	+0.39
Supabase	105	84	+25.0 %	+0.12
PostgreSQL	1 229	1 315	−6.6 %	+1.22
Snowflake	106	156	−32.1 %	+0.01
Redis	180	236	−23.7 %	+0.07
MySQL	164	185	−11.4 %	+0.03
MongoDB	96	78	+23.1 %	+0.03
DynamoDB	25	38	−34.2 %	−0.08
BigQuery	20	35	−42.9 %	−0.05
Redshift	10	18	−44.4 %	−0.05
TimescaleDB	3	4	−25.0 %	−0.01

DuckDB tops the growth chart: half of its lifetime headlines appeared this year. ClickHouse maintains double-digit gains on a larger base, buoyed by vector search & managed services. Supabase benefits from the “Firebase, but OSS” narrative. PostgreSQL’s YoY dip merely reflects an all-time-high 2023; its 3-yr slope (+1.22) is the steepest of all. Cloud-native SaaS engines (DynamoDB, BigQuery, Redshift) are down sharply in share of conversation.

3 · Engines in decline

Headline counts aren’t everything, but they do reveal mind-share:

Engine	Peak year	Peak headlines	2024-25 headlines	% off peak
MongoDB	2013	242	96	−60 %
MySQL	2009	267	164	−39 %
DynamoDB	2019	59	25	−58 %
BigQuery	2020	62	20	−68 %
Redshift	2016	61	10	−84 %

Why? Maturity – less novelty, fewer “Show HN” launches. OSS competition – Postgres extensions + parquet/iceberg lakehouses replace single-purpose stores. Discussion shift – Cost, lock-in, and serverless topics often omit the product name.

What the trends mean for builders

Open source drives mind-share Every top-growing engine is OSS (or built on OSS, in Supabase’s case). Analytics is the new hot zone DuckDB & ClickHouse thrive as data moves from batch warehouses to real-time & local notebooks. Boring can still win PostgreSQL proves that relentless incremental improvement beats flashy hype cycles. Cloud SaaS needs fresh stories Proprietary services are profitable but inspire fewer community write-ups; the marketing challenge is different.

How the analysis was done

I used camelAI with a ClickHouse database of every HN story to do all analysis. You can use it for free with no login here to explore the data interactively yourself.