DBMS > Citus vs. CockroachDB vs. CrateDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. CockroachDB vs. CrateDB vs. IBM Cloudant vs. MariaDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	5.73
Rank	#58	Overall
	#34	Relational DBMS

Score	0.71
Rank	#227	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.cockroachlabs.com

cratedb.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

cratedb.com/docs

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

Developer

Cockroach Labs

Crate

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Initial release

2010

2015

2013

2010

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

Current release

8.1, December 2018

24.1.0, May 2024

11.3.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

Java

Erlang

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

Linux
macOS
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic schema

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

user defined functions (Javascript)

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

Sharding

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication using RAFT

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

rights management via user accounts

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

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
» more

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
» more

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.