DBMS > ClickHouse vs. HEAVY.AI vs. OpenSearch vs. PostGIS vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. HEAVY.AI vs. OpenSearch vs. PostGIS vs. QuestDB

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 high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

Secondary database models

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	16.36
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	22.69
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

postgis.net

questdb.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.heavy.ai

opensearch.org/docs/latest

postgis.net/documentation

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Amazon Web Services

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2016

2021

2005

2014

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

5.10, January 2022

2.5.0, January 2023

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL v2.0

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.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
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.

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.
STACKIT OpenSearch offers OpenSearch in a managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant, for a wide range of applications like analytics, website search, offering scalability and fast data access.

Implementation language

C++

C++ and CUDA

Java

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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)

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

yes

based on PostgreSQL

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

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

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

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

based on PostgreSQL

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
» more

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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