DBMS > GridGain vs. Informix vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison GridGain vs. Informix vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

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

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

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

Primary database model

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.55
Rank	#150	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.gridgain.com

www.ibm.com/products/informix

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

www.timescale.com

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

Technical documentation

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

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

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

docs.timescale.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

GridGain Systems, Inc.

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.

Microsoft

Timescale

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2007

1984

1989

2017

2019

Current release

GridGain 8.5.1

14.10.FC5, November 2020

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

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Implementation language

Java, C++, .Net

C, C++ and Java

C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

JDBC
JSON API

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

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

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

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

yes

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

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes (replicated cache)

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

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

Security Hooks for custom implementations

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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