DBMS > Informix vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB vs. Vitess

System Properties Comparison Informix vs. Snowflake vs. TiDB vs. Vitess

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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

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

Scalable, distributed, cloud-native DBMS, extending MySQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Score	0.88
Rank	#203	Overall
	#95	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.snowflake.com

pingcap.com

vitess.io

Technical documentation

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

vitess.io/docs

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.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

The Linux Foundation, PlanetScale

Initial release

1984

2014

2016

2013

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

8.1.0, May 2024

15.0.2, December 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0, commercial licenses 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.

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

Implementation language

C, C++ and Java

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux

Docker
Linux
macOS

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

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
JSON API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

yes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

full support since version 6.6

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID at shard level

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

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

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Competitive advantages

- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

Market metrics

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

Licensing and pricing models

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.