DBMS > ClickHouse vs. FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. Prometheus vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. FoundationDB vs. Postgres-XL vs. Prometheus vs. SpaceTime

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the 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.

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Open-source Time Series DBMS and monitoring system

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Spatial 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	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	7.69
Rank	#50	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.03
Rank	#392	Overall
	#8	Spatial DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org

prometheus.io

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

apple.github.io/foundationdb

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

prometheus.io/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

FoundationDB

Mireo

Initial release

2016

2013

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2015

2020

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

Linux
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

Numeric data only

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Import of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

APIs and other access methods

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

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

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
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

.Net
C++
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

by Federation

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

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

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

yes

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