DBMS > ClickHouse vs. EXASOL vs. Graph Engine vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. EXASOL vs. Graph Engine vs. QuestDB 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.

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

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.exasol.com/resources

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Exasol

Microsoft

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2000

2010

2014

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

.NET and C

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

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

.NET

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP API

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

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

Java
Lua
Python
R

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

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

over HTTP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

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

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

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

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