DBMS > ClickHouse vs. DuckDB vs. GeoMesa vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. DuckDB vs. GeoMesa vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. QuestDB

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.

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

GeoMesa is a distributed spatio-temporal DBMS based on various systems as storage layer.

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Key-value store
Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series 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	4.63
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	0.86
Rank	#205	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Score	3.15
Rank	#95	Overall
	#14	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	2.70
Rank	#105	Overall
	#8	Time Series DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

duckdb.org

www.geomesa.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

questdb.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

duckdb.org/docs

www.geomesa.org/documentation/stable/user/index.html

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

CCRi and others

Google

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2016

2018

2014

2015

2014

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

1.0.0, June 2024

5.0.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

commercial

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.

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++

Scala

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

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

server-less

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

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

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#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

none

depending on storage layer

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

none

depending on storage layer

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

depending on storage layer

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

ACID for single-table writes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

depending on storage layer

yes

through memory mapped files

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.

yes

depending on the DBMS used for storage

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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...
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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

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