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Location: Blogs
Steven Feuerstein's Blog
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| StevenFeuersteinTW |
Monday, February 04, 2008 11:56 AM |
Just how popular is PL/SQL?
And how many PL/SQL developers are there "out there"?
These are surprisingly hard questions to answer. Officially and even unofficially, Oracle Corporation's point people on PL/SQL do not have any idea (or refuse to say) how many PL/SQL developers there are.
I take the approach of doing some rough extrapolations from numbers of books I and other PL/SQL developers have sold, and I conclude that there are perhaps a couple million PL/SQL developers, all told.
That is, however, very unscientific.
There are some websites, however, that offer an analysis of relative popularity of languages, usually based on data they have retrieved from various search sites.
TIOBE
Here is the list as of January 2008:
Ok, fine, so PL/SQL is not the most popular language. We all know that. What I was very pleased to see is that PL/SQL had increased in popularity over the last year. Based on my experience in India, I can see why; most of the increase probably came from there alone!
Here is some information from the TIOBE website about how they calculate their ratings:
- The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search engines. The search query that is used is: +" programming"
- The search query is executed for the regular Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube web search for the last 12 months. The web site Alexa.com has been used to determine the most popular search engines.
- The number of hits determine the ratings of a language. The counted hits are normalized for each search engine for the first 50 languages. In other words, the first 50 languages together have a score of 100%.
Let's define "hits50(SE)" as the sum of the number of hits for the first 50 languages for search engine SE and "hits(PL,SE)" as the number of hits for programming language PL for search engine SE, then the formal definition of the ratings becomes
((hits(PL,SE1)/hits50(SE1) + ... + hits(PL,SEn)/hits50(SEn))/n
where n is the number of search engines used.
LangPop
The nice thing about the TIOBE site is that they rank PL/SQL explicitly. All the other language popularity pages I could find simply list "SQL," which I took to mean "SQL and all procedural language extensions to SQL."
O'Reilly Media Popularity by Book Sales
O'Reilly Media, publisher of all my books on PL/SQL, has a research arm ("O'Reilly Radar") that projects programming language trends based on book sales. Again, there is just a single entry for SQL:
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Comments (2)
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By hillbillyToad on
Monday, February 04, 2008 12:23 PM |
I agree whole-heartedly Steven, it's very telling that PL/SQL is explicitly listed. It's the only language on that list that is dependent on a database or application platform.
Another telling piece is the amount of work Oracle puts into the PL/SQL language for each new release. It doesn't seem to be slowing down at all! |
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By Belly on
Friday, February 20, 2009 3:09 AM |
Sorry, Steven I'm a bit slow. Haven't seen this post before.
I am afraid that your remark "That is, however, very unscientific" also goes for the rest of the post.
Although the numbers, the calculations and the graphs seem to be quite scientific, the link with popularity, or number of plsql developers isn't.
There are just to many unknowns that (obviously) aren't taken into account.
Search hits do not give us information about who is searching or why.
Some examples that have an effect on the correlation between the hits and the number of developers:
1. let's face it plsql is a relatively easy language. Although I will be the very last to say one ever knows it all or even enough, and although I do not wish to say my most favorite language is just a toy language, there are simply a lot more difficult constructs and hard to handle issues with, let's say, C (Position 2) then there are with PlSql. So C developers might have to resort to the internet more often then plsql developers.
2. A language like Java is used a lot by amateurs (mind you: I'm not saying anything about the quality of there work, which often is great). Plsql is a language almost exclusively used by professionals. Since a professional USUALLY has a better understanding and knowledge of his tools he probably needs to less searches on his language to get his job done.
3. Maybe, just maybe, the average developer for language x is better at his work then the one for language y. I'm deliberately not mentioning any language by name here since it's a question, there is nothing to back such a statement. However, if it's true, the better developer might need to search less. On the other hand he might be better because he searches more.
4. Maybe developers for certain languages are more prone to being arrogant enough to think they know it all and therefor do not need any more information. I know I come across this type every now and then in the plsql world. How common this is in other languages, I don't know.
5. What looks like an increase in popularity for plsql in 2008 might, as you say, be thanks to India.
However, 2008 is also the year in which Oracle Apex suddenly got a lot more attention. Apex can and does use plsql, yes. And a lot of 'old fashioned' plsql- and forms developers are now turning to apex. However, a lot of people developing with apex have a different (i.e. java) background and are NOT plsql developers. If you doubt this, have a look around at the apex forum. There are quite a few questions there related to sql and plsql, that any plsql developer can answer without even having to wake up.
This probably caused a lot of extra plqsl related searches. But they do not count as plsql developers, since they only use plsql in apex if they really have to. Just like some plsql developers using apex do not want to know about the java part of the tool, have to do a search to know the html tag for bold text, and get very nervous when they see the xml-source for a chart.
Erik van Roon
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