DBMS > Apache Drill vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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.

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.02
Rank	#124	Overall
	#22	Document stores
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	76.78
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2012

2016

2017

2010

1992

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

V12

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

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

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Transact SQL

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

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

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

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

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)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.