DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog vs. TiDB

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

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

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store

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

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

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

www.snowflake.com

www.stardog.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.stardog.com

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Stardog-Union

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

1989

2014

2010

2016

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

7.3.0, May 2020

8.0.0, March 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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++

Java

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

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

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

user defined functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

yes

none

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

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

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

Access rights for users and roles

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

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.