DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. IRONdb vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. EXASOL vs. IRONdb vs. RDF4J

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

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, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	16.20
Rank	#37	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	134.78
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	2.25
Rank	#120	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	0.71
Rank	#231	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

clickhouse.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.exasol.com

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

rdf4j.org

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Elastic

Exasol

Circonus LLC.

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Initial release

2016

2010

2000

2017

2004

Current release

v24.3.2.23-lts, April 2024

8.6, January 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

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.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Implementation language

C++

Java

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

HTTP API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

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
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes, in Lua

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Memcached and Redis integration

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, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

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