Apache Derby was once a popular system to mock an SQL-Engine during unit tests. A use-case that vanished by the ease of which “the real SQL systems” are available during development nowadays. Thus, the following note might be sad, but nor surprising: “On 2025-10-10, the Derby developers voted to retire the project into a read-only state. Derby development and bug-fixing have ended. No further releases will be published”. Consequently, I’ve removed Apache Derby from the charts on modern-sql.com.
As every end is a new beginning modern-sql.com now covers DuckDB instead. DuckDB is an in-process System that aims at analytic workloads on commodity hardware such as your laptop computer. DuckDB is often praised for its ease of use and its capability to use all CPU cores of the system it is running on. That is quite often enough scalability. In particular, when different uses have copies of the database locally on their computer. If that sounds reasonably to you, you might want to give DuckDB a try.
Just because I can I’m also putting the chart about the merge statement here (introduced with DuckDB 1.4, as you can see below).
- Not all operations
- ⚡Ambiguities not always reported
- Not all syntax variants
- ⚡Applies multiple rules
In other news: modern-sql.com has got a dark mode, first training dates for 2026 announced (including US shift).
