DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

An in-memory SQL relational database that delivers microsecond response and high throughput for OLTP applications. TimesTen can be deployed as a standalone database or as a cache to a backend Oracle database.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	1.29
Rank	#155	Overall
	#69	Relational DBMS

Score	168.09
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.13
Rank	#171	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

www.snowflake.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/timesten/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Oracle

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2014

1998

Current release

Release 22.1

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Server operating systems

hosted

IBM AIX Power PC 64-bit
Linux arm64
Linux x86-64
Solaris SPARC 64
Solaris SPARC/x86
Solaris x86-64

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)
Pro*C/C++ programming interfaces
SQL and PL/SQL via JDBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Java
Node.js
PL/SQL
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Snowflake is the Database Management System of the Year 2024
16 January 2025, Tom Russell

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2022, defending the title from last year
3 January 2023, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2021
3 January 2022, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

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Recent citations in the news

Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB Breaks TPC-C Benchmark World Record with Innovative ‘Three-Layer Decoupling’ Architecture
26 February 2025, Alizila

Alibaba Cloud’s PolarDB Breaks TPC-C Record
12 March 2025, CDOTrends

Figure 1: Illustration of POLARDB architecture.
3 November 2024, ResearchGate

Alibaba Cloud PolarDB Tops Global Database Performance, Price/tpmC Rankings
25 February 2025, AASTOCKS.com

Alibaba Rolls Own Distributed File System for Cloud Database Performance
21 August 2018, The Next Platform

provided by Google News

Snowflake for Applications & Collaboration | AI Data Cloud
17 February 2025, Snowflake

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) Price Prediction and Forecast 2025-2030 (April 2025)
23 April 2025, 24/7 Wall St.

Snowflake Achieves Department of Defense IL5 Authorization, Furthering Position as the Trusted AI Data Cloud for Government and Defense Customers
10 April 2025, Business Wire

Snowflake for Data Lakes
17 February 2025, Snowflake

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12 March 2012, theregister.com

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