DBMS > Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. GridDB vs. SwayDB vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. GridDB vs. SwayDB vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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.

Scalable in-memory time series database optimized for IoT and Big Data

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Document store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.95
Rank	#128	Overall
	#10	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.griddb.net

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Clickhouse Inc.

Toshiba Corporation

Simer Plaha

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2016

2013

2018

2016

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

5.1, August 2022

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

AGPL version 3 and Apache License, version 2.0 , commercial license (standard and advanced editions) also available

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

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

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Scala

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerical, string, blob, geometry, boolean, timestamp

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL92, SQL-like TQL (Toshiba Query Language)

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

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

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

key based and custom

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

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

Source-replica replication

none

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Connector for using GridDB as an input source and output destination for Hadoop MapReduce jobs

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency within container, eventual consistency across containers

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID at container level

Atomic execution of operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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 can be defined per database

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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GridDB is a highly scalable, in-memory time series database optimized for IoT and...
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TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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1. Optimized for IoT Equipped with Toshiba's proprietary key-container data model...
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Factory IoT, Automative Industry, Energy, BEMS, Smart Community, Monitoring system.
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TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Denso International [see use case ] An Electric Power company [see use case ] Ishinomaki...
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Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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GitHub trending repository
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34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Open Source license (AGPL v3 & Apache v2) Commercial license (subscription)
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TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.