DBMS > Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. GBase vs. Ignite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. ClickHouse vs. GBase vs. Ignite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Apache Ignite is a memory-centric distributed database, caching, and processing platform for transactional, analytical, and streaming workloads, delivering in-memory speeds at petabyte scale.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.07
Rank	#185	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	3.16
Rank	#96	Overall
	#15	Key-value stores
	#49	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

clickhouse.com/docs

apacheignite.readme.io/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Apache Software Foundation

Timescale

Initial release

2010

2016

2004

2015

2017

Current release

8.1, December 2018

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

Apache Ignite 2.6

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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.
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.

Implementation language

C++

C, Java, Python

C++, Java, .Net

Server operating systems

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

Standard with numerous extensions

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

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

Supported programming languages

.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#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

user defined functions

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

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

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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.

yes

yes (replicated cache)

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

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

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.

yes

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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