DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Splunk vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Splunk vs. SurrealDB

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Analytics Platform for Big Data

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	86.45
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Score	0.86
Rank	#203	Overall
	#34	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.splunk.com

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Elastic

Microsoft

Splunk Inc.

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2016

2010

1989

2003

2022

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

8.6, January 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

v1.1.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition available

Open Source

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.

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++

Java

C++

Rust

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

yes

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

HTTP REST

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights for users and roles

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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