DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostgreSQL vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. PostgreSQL vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Widely used open source RDBMS

Developed as objectoriented DBMS (Postgres), gradually enhanced with 'standards' like SQL

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

with object oriented extensions, e.g.: user defined types/functions and inheritance. Handling of key/value pairs with hstore module.

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Apache Age
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

with pgvector extension

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

Score	785.01
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	667.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	168.09
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

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

www.postgresql.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

www.postgresql.org/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2014

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

16.4, August 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
OS X
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

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

specific XML-type available, but no XML query functionality.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard with numerous extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

partitioning by range, list and (since PostgreSQL 11) by hash

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

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

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

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