DBMS > Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	807.76
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.06
Rank	#73	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.38
Rank	#156	Overall
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	0.13
Rank	#330	Overall
	#45	Document stores

Website

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

www.timescale.com

www.voltdb.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.timescale.com

docs.voltdb.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Timescale

VoltDB Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1989

2017

2010

2019

Current release

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

11.3, April 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Java, C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

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

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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 PostgreSQL SQL syntax

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

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

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

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

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

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

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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 and roles with access to stored procedures

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