DBMS > Apache IoTDB vs. Informix vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache IoTDB vs. Informix vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An IoT native database with high performance for data management and analysis, deployable on the edge and the cloud and integrated with Hadoop, Spark and Flink

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

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

Primary database model

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Search engine

Relational DBMS

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	1.18
Rank	#173	Overall
	#15	Time Series DBMS

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

iotdb.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/informix

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

iotdb.apache.org/UserGuide/Master/QuickStart/QuickStart.html

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

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

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.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

2018

1984

2001

2000

2017

Current release

1.1.0, April 2023

14.10.FC5, November 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

Java

C, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM (>= 1.8)

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
Native API

JDBC
JSON API

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

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

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

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
Python
Scala

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by time range) + vertical partitioning (by deviceId)

Sharding

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

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication methods; using Raft/IoTConsensus algorithm to ensure strong/eventual data consistency among multiple replicas

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Integration with Hadoop and Spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Strong Consistency with Raft

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

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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

yes

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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