DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Informix vs. Riak KV vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Informix vs. Riak KV vs. TimescaleDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Relational DBMS

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

Score	70.06
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	16.32
Rank	#35	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	3.84
Rank	#76	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

Timescale

Initial release

2012

1984

2009

2017

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

3.2.0, December 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

C, C++ and Java

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Erlang

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

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

yes, using Riak Security

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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