Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of relational database management systems. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or external programs.
In computing, a solution stack or software stack is a set of software subsystems or components needed to create a complete platform such that no additional software is needed to support applications. Applications are said to "run on" or "run on top of" the resulting platform.
An embedded database system is a database management system (DBMS) which is tightly integrated with an application software; it is embedded in the application. It is a broad technology category that includes:
HBase is an open-source non-relational distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable and written in Java. It is developed as part of Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS or Alluxio, providing Bigtable-like capabilities for Hadoop. That is, it provides a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of sparse data.
Google App Engine is a cloud computing platform as a service for developing and hosting of web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. App Engine supports automatic scaling for web applications, allocating more resources to the web application as the amount of requests increases. The service was released as preview in April 2008, and launched formally in September 2011.
Redis is a source-available, in-memory storage, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Redis offers low-latency reads and writes, making it particularly suitable for use cases that require a cache. Redis is the most popular NoSQL database, and one of the most popular databases overall. Redis is used in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, Yahoo, Adobe, Hulu, Amazon and OpenAI.
Cloudant is an IBM software product, which is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service. Cloudant is a non-relational, distributed database service of the same name. Cloudant is based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the open source BigCouch project.
OrientDB is an open source NoSQL database management system written in Java. It is a Multi-model database, supporting graph, document and object models, the relationships are managed as in graph databases with direct connections between records. It supports schema-less, schema-full and schema-mixed modes. It has a strong security profiling system based on users and roles and supports querying with Gremlin along with SQL extended for graph traversal. OrientDB uses several indexing mechanisms based on B-tree and Extendible hashing, the last one is known as "hash index". Each record has Surrogate key which indicates the position of the record on disk. Links between records (edges) are stored either as the record's position stored directly inside of the referrer or as B-tree of record positions, that serves as a container of RIDs, which allows fast traversal of one-to-many relationships and fast addition/removal of new links. OrientDB is the 6th most popular graph database according to the DB-Engines graph database ranking, as of January 2024.
Apache Drill is an open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. Built chiefly by contributions from developers from MapR, Drill is inspired by Google's Dremel system. Drill is an Apache top-level project. Tom Shiran is the founder of the Apache Drill Project. It was designated an Apache Software Foundation top-level project in December 2016.
FoundationDB is a free and open-source multi-model distributed NoSQL database developed by Apple Inc. with a shared-nothing architecture. The product was designed around a "core" database, with additional features supplied in "layers." The core database exposes an ordered key–value store with transactions. The transactions are able to read or write multiple keys stored on any machine in the cluster while fully supporting ACID properties. Transactions are used to implement a variety of data models via layers.
Presto is a distributed query engine for big data using the SQL query language. Its architecture allows users to query data sources such as Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, AWS S3, Alluxio, MySQL, MongoDB and Teradata, and allows use of multiple data sources within a query. Presto is community-driven open-source software released under the Apache License.
RocksDB is a high performance embedded database for key-value data. It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit multi-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound workloads. It is based on a log-structured merge-tree data structure. It is written in C++ and provides official language bindings for C++, C, and Java. Many third-party language bindings exist. RocksDB is free and open-source software, released originally under a BSD 3-clause license. However, in July 2017 the project was migrated to a dual license of both Apache 2.0 and GPLv2 license. This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.
DBeaver is a SQL client software application and a database administration tool. For relational databases it uses the JDBC application programming interface (API) to interact with databases via a JDBC driver. For other databases (NoSQL) it uses proprietary database drivers. It provides an editor that supports code completion and syntax highlighting. It provides a plug-in architecture that allows users to modify much of the application's behavior to provide database-specific functionality or features that are database-independent. This is a desktop application written in Java and based on Eclipse platform.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
TiDB is an open-source NewSQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. Designed to be MySQL compatible, it is developed and supported primarily by PingCAP and licensed under Apache 2.0. It is also available as a paid product. TiDB drew its initial design inspiration from Google's Spanner and F1 papers.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was started in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution.
Trino is an open-source distributed SQL query engine designed to query large data sets distributed over one or more heterogeneous data sources. Trino can query data lakes that contain open column-oriented data file formats like ORC or Parquet residing on different storage systems like HDFS, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage using the Hive and Iceberg table formats. Trino also has the ability to run federated queries that query tables in different data sources such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Kafka, MongoDB and Elasticsearch. Trino is released under the Apache License.
RavenDB is an open-source document-oriented database written in C#, developed by Hibernating Rhinos Ltd. It is cross-platform, supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. RavenDB stores data as JSON documents and can be deployed in distributed clusters with master-master replication.
