DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Google BigQuery vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. Splice Machine

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Google BigQuery vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. Splice Machine

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

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

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.54
Rank	#250	Overall
	#114	Relational DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/bigquery

questdb.io

www.snowflake.com

splicemachine.com

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

Developer

Elastic

Google

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Splice Machine

Initial release

2010

2014

Current release

8.6, January 2023

3.1, March 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

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

Java

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

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

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

in JavaScript

user defined functions

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

through memory mapped files

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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