There's been an explosion of new DBs, but I haven't found anything that really beats Postgres or MariaDB for most workloads. The main advantages of these battle tested DBs is that they're easy to operate, well understood, full featured, and can handle most workloads.
It does make me wonder what will be the next big leap in DB technology. Most of the NoSQL or distributed DB implementations have a bunch of limitations which make them impractical (or not worth the trade offs) for most applications, IMO. Distributed DBs are great until things go wrong, and then you have a nightmare on your hands. It's a lot easier to optimize simple relational DBs with caching layers, and adding read replicas scales quite effectively too.
The only somewhat recent new DB that comes to mind which had a really interesting model was RethinkDB, although it suffered from a variety of issues, including scale problems.
Anyway, these days I stick with Postgres for 99% of things, and mix in Redis where needed for key/value stuff.
It does make me wonder what will be the next big leap in DB technology. Most of the NoSQL or distributed DB implementations have a bunch of limitations which make them impractical (or not worth the trade offs) for most applications, IMO. Distributed DBs are great until things go wrong, and then you have a nightmare on your hands. It's a lot easier to optimize simple relational DBs with caching layers, and adding read replicas scales quite effectively too.
The only somewhat recent new DB that comes to mind which had a really interesting model was RethinkDB, although it suffered from a variety of issues, including scale problems.
Anyway, these days I stick with Postgres for 99% of things, and mix in Redis where needed for key/value stuff.