DBMS > ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Weaviate

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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial 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	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

couchdb.apache.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

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

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2016

2005

1989

1992

2019

Current release

v24.3.2.23-lts, April 2024

3.3.3, December 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

17, July 2015

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

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

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions in JavaScript

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

none

Sharding

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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