DBMS > DuckDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostGIS

System Properties Comparison DuckDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostGIS

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	4.57
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	22.69
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Website

duckdb.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

postgis.net

Technical documentation

duckdb.org/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

postgis.net/documentation

Developer

Microsoft

Initial release

2018

1989

2005

Current release

0.10, February 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.4.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL v2.0

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.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

server-less

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

yes

based on PostgreSQL

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

based on PostgreSQL

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.