DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Dolt vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. QuestDB vs. Splice Machine

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Dolt vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. QuestDB vs. Splice Machine

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 MySQL compatible DBMS with Git-like versioning of data and schema

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

Relational DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.02
Rank	#191	Overall
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	2.70
Rank	#105	Overall
	#8	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.54
Rank	#252	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

github.com/dolthub/dolt
www.dolthub.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

questdb.io

splicemachine.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.dolthub.com

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

questdb.io/docs

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

DoltHub Inc

Microsoft

QuestDB Technology Inc

Splice Machine

Initial release

2016

2018

2019

2014

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

3.1, March 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

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

Implementation language

C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
HTTP REST

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

currently in alpha release

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

A database can be cloned to multiple locations and be used there in isolation. Data/schema changes can be pushed/pulled explicitly between locations.

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

through memory mapped files

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.

Only one user is configurable, and must be specified in the config file at startup

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

News

Fluid real-time dashboards with Grafana and QuestDB
11 June 2024

QuestDB 8.0: Major Release
23 May 2024

QuestDB and Raspberry Pi 5 benchmark, a pocket-sized powerhouse
8 May 2024

Build your own resource monitor with QuestDB and Grafana
6 May 2024

Does "vpmovzxbd" Scare You? Here's Why it Doesn't Have To
12 April 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.