DBMS > ClickHouse vs. CockroachDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Informix vs. Kingbase

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. CockroachDB vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Informix vs. Kingbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

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.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

An enterprise-class RDBMS compatible with PostgreSQL and Oracle and widely used in China.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	5.73
Rank	#58	Overall
	#34	Relational DBMS

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	0.50
Rank	#257	Overall
	#119	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.cockroachlabs.com

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

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.kingbase.com.cn

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

docs.heavy.ai

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

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Cockroach Labs

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

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.

BeiJing KINGBASE Information technologies inc.

Initial release

2016

2015

2016

1984

1999

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

24.1.0, May 2024

5.10, January 2022

14.10.FC5, November 2020

V8.0, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

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.
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.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Implementation language

C++

C++ and CUDA

C, C++ and Java

C and Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

yes

dynamic schema

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

yes

Standard with numerous extensions

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

JDBC

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
JSON API

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

ADO.NET
gokb
JDBC
kdbndp
ODBC
PDI
PDO
Pro*C
psycopg2
QT

Supported programming languages

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

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

Round robin

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication using RAFT

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

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.

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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