DBMS > Informix vs. SingleStore vs. Snowflake vs. Splunk vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Informix vs. SingleStore vs. Snowflake vs. Splunk vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

MySQL wire-compliant distributed RDBMS that combines an in-memory row-oriented and a disc-based column-oriented storage with patented universal storage to handle transactional and analytical workloads in one single table type

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

Analytics Platform for Big Data

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Document store

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

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	5.38
Rank	#62	Overall
	#35	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	89.10
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/informix

Technical documentation

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

docs.singlestore.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

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.

SingleStore Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Splunk Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

1984

2013

2014

2003

2016

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

8.5, January 2024

8.1.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

SingleStoreDB Cloud: The world's fastest, modern cloud database for both operational (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads. Available instantly with multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud capabilities

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

C, C++ and Java

C++, Go

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

64 bit version required

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

but no triggers and foreign keys

yes

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
JSON API

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

Cluster Management API

as HTTP Rest and CLI
HTTP API
JDBC
MongoDB API
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

Bash
C
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

hash partitioning

yes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

stores two copies of each physical data partition on two separate nodes

yes

Multi-source replication

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

can define user-defined aggregate functions for map-reduce-style calculations

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

All updates are persistent, including those to disk-based columnstores and memory-based row stores. Transaction commits are supported via write-ahead log.

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

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

Fine grained access control via users, groups and roles

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

Access rights for users and roles

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

SingleStore offers a fully-managed , distributed, highly-scalable SQL database designed...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

SingleStore’s competitive advantages include: Easy and Simplified Architecture with...
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Driving Fast Analytics: SingleStore delivers the fastest and most scalable reporting...
» more

TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
» more

Key customers

IEX Cloud : Improves Financial Data Distribution Speed 15x with Singlestore DB Comcast,...
» more

Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
» more

Market metrics

Customers in various industries worldwide including US and International Industry...
» more

34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

F ree Tier and Enterprise Edition
» more

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.