DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Snowflake

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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.

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	18.73
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	168.09
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2014

Current release

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

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

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.

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Snowflake is the Database Management System of the Year 2024
16 January 2025, Tom Russell

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2022, defending the title from last year
3 January 2023, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2021
3 January 2022, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

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