DBMS > Kingbase vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Kingbase vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. TiDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise-class RDBMS compatible with PostgreSQL and Oracle and widely used in China.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

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

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store

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

Score	0.45
Rank	#262	Overall
	#123	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

BeiJing KINGBASE Information technologies inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

1999

2014

2001

2016

Current release

V8.0, August 2021

3.5.1, February 2023

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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.

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

Implementation language

C and Java

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
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

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Standard with numerous extensions

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
gokb
JDBC
kdbndp
ODBC
PDI
PDO
Pro*C
psycopg2
QT

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

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

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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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