DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Kdb vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Kdb vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB

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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.

High performance Time Series DBMS

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

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	7.55
Rank	#53	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

code.kx.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2016

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

2014

2016

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

3.6, May 2018

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free 32-bit version

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

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

table attribute 'grouped'

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language (q)

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

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

C
C#
C++
Go
J
Java
JavaScript
Lua
MatLab
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

with views

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Source-replica replication

yes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

similar paradigm used for internal processing

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

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

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.

rights management via user accounts

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Integrated columnar database & programming system for streaming, real time and historical...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
» more

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
» more

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
» more

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

upon request
» more

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.