DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP HANA vs. Snowflake vs. Tarantool vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. SAP HANA vs. Snowflake vs. Tarantool vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

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

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

Relational DBMS

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

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	1.72
Rank	#144	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

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

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.snowflake.com

www.tarantool.io

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

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

help.sap.com/hana

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Microsoft

SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

1989

2010

2014

2008

2017

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

2.10.0, May 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

also available as a cloud based service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

hosted

BSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Open binary protocol

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

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

SQLScript, R

user defined functions

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

yes

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, cooperative multitasking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

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

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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