DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. Kdb vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. Kdb vs. PouchDB vs. Snowflake

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 distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

High performance Time Series DBMS

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	7.71
Rank	#49	Overall
	#2	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Apache Software Foundation

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2011

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

2012

2014

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

3.6, May 2018

7.1.1, June 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

free 32-bit version

Open Source

commercial

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.

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.
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.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

JavaScript

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

table attribute 'grouped'

yes

via views

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like query language (q)

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Go
J
Java
JavaScript
Lua
MatLab
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Scala

JavaScript

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

with views

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Automatic Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

yes

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

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

similar paradigm used for internal processing

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

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.

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

rights management via user accounts

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Integrated columnar database & programming system for streaming, real time and historical...
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Competitive advantages

provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
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Typical application scenarios

tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
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Key customers

Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
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Market metrics

kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
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Licensing and pricing models

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