DBMS > Citus vs. Datomic vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IRONdb vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Datomic vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IRONdb vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

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

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

www.citusdata.com

www.datomic.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

docs.datomic.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Cognitect

Google

Circonus LLC.

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2010

2012

2017

2013

Current release

8.1, December 2018

1.0.7075, December 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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.

Implementation language

Java, Clojure

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

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

Clojure
Java

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

Transaction Functions

yes, in Lua

Triggers

yes

By using transaction functions

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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