DBMS > MariaDB vs. NuoDB vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison MariaDB vs. NuoDB vs. PlanetScale vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Scalable, distributed, serverless MySQL database platform built on top of Vitess

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	1.59
Rank	#151	Overall
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Website

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

planetscale.com

www.snowflake.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

doc.nuodb.com

planetscale.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

PlanetScale

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2013

2020

2014

2018

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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.

Implementation language

C and C++

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Docker
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

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

schema-free

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
MySQL protocol
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Java, SQL

yes

proprietary syntax

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Sharding

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency across shards
Immediate Consistency within a shard

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

tunable commit protocol

ACID at shard level

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

Temporary table

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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