DBMS > Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Informix vs. NSDb vs. Riak TS

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Informix vs. NSDb vs. Riak TS

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

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

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Riak TS is a distributed NoSQL database optimized for time series data and based on Riak KV

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.28
Rank	#307	Overall
	#27	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/informix

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/ts/latest

Developer

Google

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.

Open Source, formerly Basho Technologies

Initial release

2010

2017

1984

2017

2015

Current release

8.1, December 2018

14.10.FC5, November 2020

3.0.0, September 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

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

C, C++ and Java

Java, Scala

Erlang

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

SQL-like query language

yes, limited

APIs and other access methods

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

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

JDBC
JSON API

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Java
Scala

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

Erlang

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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 with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

yes

links between datasets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

Recent citations in the news

Ubicloud wants to build an open source alternative to AWS
5 March 2024, TechCrunch

Ubicloud reels in $16M for its open-source cloud platform
5 March 2024, SiliconANGLE News

Microsoft acquires Citus Data, re-affirming its commitment to Open Source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL ...
24 January 2019, blogs.microsoft.com

Distributed PostgreSQL Benchmarks: Azure Cosmos DB, CockroachDB, and YugabyteDB
8 July 2023, InfoQ.com

Microsoft Benchmarks Distributed PostgreSQL DBs
10 July 2023, Datanami

provided by Google News

Google Improves Cloud Spanner: More Compute and Storage without Price Increase
14 October 2023, InfoQ.com

Google Turns Its Secret-Sauce Database Spanner into Cloud Service
1 June 2024, ITPro Today

Google turns up the heat on AWS, claims Cloud Spanner is half the cost of DynamoDB
11 October 2023, TechCrunch

Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient
11 October 2023, SiliconANGLE News

Google Cloud just fired a major volley at AWS as the cloud wars heat up
12 October 2023, TechRadar

provided by Google News

IBM Informix: A key part of IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy
11 January 2024, IBM

IBM Buys Informix for $1 Billion
1 June 2024, ITPro Today

Unlock the value of your Informix data for advanced analytics and AI with watsonx.data
24 April 2024, IBM

IBM Informix review: What you need to know about the software
12 December 2022, TechRepublic

IBM Informix Database in the Cloud | AWS News Blog
1 May 2009, AWS Blog

provided by Google News

New Basho Data Platform Provides Operational Simplicity for Enterprise Big Data Applications
7 June 2015, insideBIGDATA

provided by Google News

Share this page