DBMS > DuckDB vs. NSDb vs. PostgreSQL vs. Riak TS vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison DuckDB vs. NSDb vs. PostgreSQL vs. Riak TS vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

Riak TS is a distributed NoSQL database optimized for time series data and based on Riak KV

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Time Series DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	4.68
Rank	#76	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#396	Overall
	#42	Time Series DBMS

Score	645.05
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	0.25
Rank	#308	Overall
	#26	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.09
Rank	#351	Overall
	#47	Document stores

Website

duckdb.org

nsdb.io

www.postgresql.org

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

duckdb.org/docs

nsdb.io/Architecture

www.postgresql.org/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/ts/latest

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Open Source, formerly Basho Technologies

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2018

2017

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2015

2019

Current release

0.10, February 2024

16.2, February 2024

3.0.0, September 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Java, Scala

Erlang

Clojure

Server operating systems

server-less

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

standard with numerous extensions

yes, limited

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

HTTP REST
JDBC

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

Java
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Erlang

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

selectable replication factor

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between datasets can be stored

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

Using Apache Lucene

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

More information provided by the system vendor

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