DBMS > ClickHouse vs. FoundationDB vs. Snowflake vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. FoundationDB vs. Snowflake vs. VoltDB

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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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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.

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

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	15.88
Rank	#37	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	0.97
Rank	#191	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.38
Rank	#156	Overall
	#72	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.snowflake.com

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

FoundationDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2016

2013

2014

2010

Current release

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

6.2.28, November 2020

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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.

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.

Implementation language

C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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)

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON 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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

user defined functions

Java

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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.

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

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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