DBMS > Datomic vs. Informix vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Datomic vs. Informix vs. Sphinx vs. SQLite vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

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

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

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

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store

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

Score	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

www.datomic.com

www.ibm.com/products/informix

sphinxsearch.com

www.sqlite.org

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

docs.datomic.com

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Cognitect

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Dwayne Richard Hipp

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2012

1984

2001

2000

2016

Current release

1.0.7075, December 2023

14.10.FC5, November 2020

3.5.1, February 2023

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

8.1.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Public Domain

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.

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

Implementation language

Java, Clojure

C, C++ and Java

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less

Linux

Data scheme

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

Clojure
Java

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

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

Transaction Functions

yes

Triggers

By using transaction functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

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

none

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

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

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

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

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

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

Licensing and pricing models

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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