DBMS > ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. TimescaleDB

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.

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Relational DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#379	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.hawkular.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Community supported by Red Hat

Timescale

Initial release

2016

2005

2012

2014

2017

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

3.3.3, December 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Implementation language

C++

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

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

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#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

based on Cassandra

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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