DBMS > Citus vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Snowflake vs. TerminusDB vs. TiDB

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 RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

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

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Spatial DBMS

Document store
RDF store

Document store

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.snowflake.com

terminusdb.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

docs.heavy.ai

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2010

2016

2014

2018

2016

Current release

8.1, December 2018

5.10, January 2022

11.0.0, January 2023

8.1.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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

Implementation language

C++ and CUDA

Prolog, Rust

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

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

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

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

user defined functions

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

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Round robin

yes

Graph Partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication

yes

Journaling Streams

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

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory journaling

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

Role-based access control

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.