DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

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.

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.28
Rank	#119	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	2.15
Rank	#123	Overall
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	16.20
Rank	#37	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

docs.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Clickhouse Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2010

2016

2001

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

8.1, December 2018

v24.3.2.23-lts, April 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C++

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

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.

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