Tournament of Databases: Round 2

Dominic Preuss

27 Mar 2026 — 2 min read

Round 1 is a wrap! The Cinderella story continues for DuckDB while the heavyweights battle it out for supremacy.

Round 1 Results:

East Region:

#1 Oracle vs. #4 InfluxDB - Winner: Oracle

Oracle proves yet again that no CIO can resist sending an RFP to Oracle and eventually giving them money. While InfluxDB was able to dominate the time-series matchup, it was overwhelmed by the general usefulness of Oracle’s flagship product.

#2 MongoDB vs. #3 Elastic - Winner: MongoDB

“Just stick the JSON in the database” market leader hangs on to retire the ELK stack anchor and limit them just to metric and logging. The horizontal scaling database defended the paint and kept any outside shots from halting their march to the next round.

South Region:

#1 MySQL vs. #4 AWS DynamoDB - Winner: MySQL

Open-source optionality was able to outlast the proprietary lock-in of a hyperscaler solution. Customers want choice and want to run their database wherever they choose, which was the advantage that keeps MySQL moving forward.

#2 IBM Db2 vs. #3 DuckDB - Winner: DuckDB

The Cinderella story continues as DuckDB is able to show that modern analytics architectures are able to overcome the incumbent solution still running COBOL stored procedures. It is a stunning upset as DuckDB continues to build momentum.

West Region:

#1 PostgreSQL vs. #2 Neo4J - Winner: PostgreSQL

Even with the strong showing of graph workloads in the AI era, PostgreSQL was able to perform a Full Vacuum on the competition. It was just too much to overcome the momentum of Postgres with the community of contributors and extension authors cheering it on.

#2 Snowflake vs. #3 Cassandra - Winner: Snowflake

Serverless data warehousing and aggressive GTM motions were able to defeat the history of Cassandra and its scale-out prowess. The deafening noise of companies migrating to Snowflake was a major advantage to the winner.

Midwest Region

#1 SQL Server vs. #4 Clickhouse - Winner: SQL Server

The sheer might and resources of Microsoft were enough to give the Windows-default database a win over the up-and-coming PostgreSQL-friendly analytics engine. While Clickhouse has a ton of upside, it wasn’t enough for the current enterprise to turn away from SQL Server.

#2 Databricks vs. #3 SQLite - Winner: Databricks

The excitement of an expected IPO was all the momentum DBX needed to overcome the distribution of SQLite. Billions of devices CAN be wrong!

Round 2 Matchups

#1 Oracle vs. #2 MongoDB

It’s the enterprise leader vs. the space-defining document database in a battle for the heart of the enterprise.

#1 MySQL vs. #3 DuckDB

The OG open-source database vs. the academic darling with all the community love. OLTP vs. OLAP.

#1 PostgreSQL vs. #2 Snowflake

The new default for open-source development vs. the multi-billion dollar analytics heavyweight. Snowflake recently purchased a PostgreSQL-focused company (Crunchy Data) so maybe they had the inside scoop on how to win.

#1 SQL Server vs. #2 Databricks

The solution for the Windows ecosystem vs. the big analytics service that made its name on Azure as a 1st party service. Will it all come full circle between Microsoft and Databricks?