DBMS > ClickHouse vs. DuckDB vs. Kdb vs. Snowflake vs. SQream DB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. DuckDB vs. Kdb vs. Snowflake vs. SQream DB

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

High performance Time Series DBMS

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

a GPU-based, columnar RDBMS for big data analytics workloads

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	15.88
Rank	#37	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	5.61
Rank	#60	Overall
	#34	Relational DBMS

Score	7.73
Rank	#45	Overall
	#2	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.62
Rank	#234	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

duckdb.org/docs

code.kx.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.sqream.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

SQream Technologies

Initial release

2016

2018

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

2014

2017

Current release

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

1.0.0, June 2024

3.6, May 2018

2022.1.6, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

free 32-bit version

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.

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++

C++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

server-less

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI Standard SQL 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

table attribute 'grouped'

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL-like query language (q)

yes

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

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.Net
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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

user defined functions in Python

Triggers

yes

with views

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

none

horizontal partitioning

yes

horizontal and vertical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

none

Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

similar paradigm used for internal processing

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

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.

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...
» more

Competitive advantages

provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
» more

Typical application scenarios

tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
» more

Key customers

Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
» more

Market metrics

kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

upon request
» more

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.