DBMS > Altibase vs. ClickHouse vs. Firebird vs. QuestDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. ClickHouse vs. Firebird vs. QuestDB vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.87
Rank	#200	Overall
	#93	Relational DBMS

Score	15.88
Rank	#37	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	2.81
Rank	#98	Overall
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

clickhouse.com/docs

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

questdb.io/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Altibase

Clickhouse Inc.

Firebird Foundation

QuestDB Technology Inc

Timescale

Initial release

1999

2016

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

2017

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

5.0.1, August 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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

ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

ANSI SQL-92

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

yes

PSQL

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

none

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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