DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Snowflake vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Snowflake vs. SurrealDB

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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

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.86
Rank	#203	Overall
	#34	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.snowflake.com

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2016

2014

2022

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

v1.1.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

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.

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.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Implementation language

C++

Rust

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

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

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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