DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Postgres-XL vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. Postgres-XL vs. SwayDB

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 horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	4.05
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Website

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

www.postgres-xl.org

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

InterSystems

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2016

2017

2018

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2018

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

2023.3, June 2023

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

depending on used data model

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

MVCC

Atomic execution of operations

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.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
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