DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. SQream DB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Postgres-XL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. SQream DB

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.

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

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

a GPU-based, columnar RDBMS for big data analytics workloads

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.74
Rank	#224	Overall
	#103	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.sqream.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

SQream Technologies

Initial release

2016

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2014

2001

2017

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

10 R1, October 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

2022.1.6, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

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.
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.

Implementation language

C++

C++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI Standard SQL Types

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

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

.Net
JDBC
ODBC

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

user defined functions in Python

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

horizontal and vertical partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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

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