DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Graph Engine vs. Informix

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Graph Engine vs. Informix

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

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.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

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

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.graphengine.io

www.ibm.com/products/informix

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

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

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Microsoft

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.

Initial release

2012

2016

2017

2010

1984

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

14.10.FC5, November 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

free developer edition available

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.

Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
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.

Implementation language

C++

.NET and C

C, C++ and Java

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

.NET

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

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.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

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