DBMS > IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RRDtool vs. TimescaleDB vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RRDtool vs. TimescaleDB vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

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

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	127.49
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	829.80
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.14
Rank	#124	Overall
	#10	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.87
Rank	#74	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.20
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

www.ibm.com/products/db2

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

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.timescale.com

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

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

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.timescale.com

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

IBM

Microsoft

Tobias Oetiker

Timescale

OpenLink Software

Initial release

1983

host version

1989

1999

2017

1998

Current release

12.1, October 2016

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

1.8.0, 2022

2.13.0, November 2023

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free version is available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

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 and C++

C++

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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

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

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

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

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

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

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

none

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

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

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Licensing and pricing models

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