DBMS > PostgreSQL vs. Riak KV vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison PostgreSQL vs. Riak KV vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

Distributed, fault tolerant key-value store

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

Relational DBMS

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

Key-value store

with links between data sets and object tags for the creation of secondary indexes

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

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	636.25
Rank	#4	Overall
	#4	Relational DBMS

Score	4.01
Rank	#79	Overall
	#9	Key-value stores

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.postgresql.org

www.voltdb.com

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

Technical documentation

www.postgresql.org/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/kv/latest

docs.voltdb.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

www.postgresql.org/developer

OpenSource, formerly Basho Technologies

VoltDB Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1989

1989: Postgres, 1996: PostgreSQL

2009

2010

2019

Current release

16.3, May 2024

3.2.0, December 2022

11.3, April 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache version 2, commercial enterprise edition

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)

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Implementation language

Erlang

Java, C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

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

Linux
OS X

for development

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard with numerous extensions

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

Erlang

Java

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

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

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between data sets can be stored

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.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, using Riak Security

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

More information provided by the system vendor

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Related products and services

3rd parties

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We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

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