DBMS > PostGIS vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison PostGIS vs. Snowflake vs. TimescaleDB vs. XTDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Spatial extension of PostgreSQL

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

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

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

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Trend Chart

Score	22.69
Rank	#29	Overall
	#1	Spatial DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

postgis.net

www.snowflake.com

www.timescale.com

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

Technical documentation

postgis.net/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.timescale.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Timescale

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2005

2014

2017

2019

Current release

3.4.2, February 2024

2.13.0, November 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

GPL v2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

MIT License

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Data scheme

yes

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

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, 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

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

based on PostgreSQL

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

yes

based on PostgreSQL

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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