DBMS > Apache Druid vs. DuckDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Druid vs. DuckDB vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Open-source analytics data store designed for sub-second OLAP queries on high dimensionality and high cardinality data

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	3.18
Rank	#84	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	7.44
Rank	#44	Overall
	#27	Relational DBMS

Score	172.01
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

druid.apache.org

duckdb.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

duckdb.org/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2018

2014

Current release

30.0.0, June 2024

1.0.0, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache license v2

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix

server-less

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-less columns are supported

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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 for querying

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

manual/auto, time-based

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

none

yes

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

RBAC using LDAP or Druid internals for users and groups for read/write by datasource and system

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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More resources

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Recent citations in the news

Imply Announces the Availability of Imply Polaris, a Database-as-a-Service Built from Apache Druid, on Microsoft Azure
26 June 2024, Business Wire

How to connect DataGrip to Apache Druid
18 October 2021, Towards Data Science

Apache Druid Takes Its Place In The Pantheon Of Databases
16 June 2022, The Next Platform

Apache Druid 25.0 Delivers Multi-Stage Query Engine and Kubernetes Task Management
19 January 2023, infoq.com

Streaming fast: Druid’s event-based database practices for sub-second trillion row response
21 February 2022, Blocks and Files

provided by Google News

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with DuckDB
10 May 2025, Packt

Abusing DuckDB-WASM To Create Doom In SQL
23 April 2025, Hackaday

Streamlining access to tabular datasets stored in Amazon S3 Tables with DuckDB | Amazon Web Services
18 March 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

DuckDB project releases Local web UI, but not as open source
19 March 2025, devclass

Analyzing JSON Data with DuckDB and SQL
1 May 2025, KDnuggets

provided by Google News

HiveMQ, Snowflake partner on automotive IoT data solution
12 May 2025, Engineering.com

Build End-to-End Pipelines in Python with Snowflake
7 May 2025, snowflake.com

Snowflake Challenger ClickHouse Targets $6 Billion Valuation
9 May 2025, The Information

Snowflake launches auto industry-specific AI capabilities
6 May 2025, TechTarget

Data Discoveries: Snowflake to present exclusive keynote at DevSparks Bengaluru 2025
12 May 2025, YourStory.com

provided by Google News

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