DBMS > mSQL vs. Postgres-XL vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison mSQL vs. Postgres-XL vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.postgres-xl.org

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Hughes Technologies

Tobias Oetiker

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1994

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

1999

2014

2001

Current release

4.4, October 2021

10 R1, October 2018

1.8.0, 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Linux
macOS

HP-UX
Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning

none

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

none

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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