DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Graphite vs. Infobright vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Graphite vs. Infobright vs. TimescaleDB

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 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

Data logging and graphing tool for time series data

The storage layer (fixed size database) is called Whisper

High performant column-oriented DBMS for analytic workloads using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a frontend

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	16.50
Rank	#35	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	131.64
Rank	#8	Overall
	#1	Search engines
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	4.91
Rank	#64	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.86
Rank	#201	Overall
	#96	Relational DBMS

Score	3.68
Rank	#74	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web

ignitetech.com/softwarelibrary/infobrightdb

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

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

graphite.readthedocs.io

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Elastic

Chris Davis

Ignite Technologies Inc.; formerly InfoBright Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2016

2010

2006

2005

2017

Current release

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

8.6, January 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

The open source (GPLv2) version did not support inserts/updates/deletes and was discontinued with July 2016

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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++

Java

Python

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Unix

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data 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

All search fields are automatically indexed

Knowledge Grid Technology used instead

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP API
Sockets

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

none

Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

none

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

locking

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

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.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

exploiting MySQL or PostgreSQL frontend capabilities

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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