Apache IoTDB vs DolphinDB

Apache IoTDB is an open-source industrial IoT time-series database for collecting, storing, managing, and analyzing device data across edge and cloud deployments. The project describes high-speed writes for millions of networked devices alongside fast reads. Query features include aligning time across devices and sensors, time-series computation, and aggregation by time dimensions. Ingestion options include IoTDB-SQL, JDBC, Java, C++, Python, and Go native APIs, REST, MQTT, CSV, and TsFile. Named analysis ecosystem examples include Hadoop, Spark, Flink, and Grafana. Deployment options include cloud installation, a desktop terminal tool, and synchronization between cloud and on-premise machines. The REST service is disabled by default and uses Basic Authentication except for the health check endpoint. Data and cluster permissions can be managed through users, roles, and privileges. The homepage states disk storage can cost less than $0.23 per GB. The project lists energy, aerospace, transportation, steel, and other IoT scenarios. Its JDBC documentation cautions that insert operations may not provide high-performance writing and recommends the Java Native API for Java applications.

DolphinDB is a real-time analytics and stream-processing platform built around a high-performance time-series database. Its storage engines cover time-series databases, OLAP and in-memory OLTP workloads, with more than 1,500 built-in analytical functions and more than 10 streaming engines. Batch and stream processing can use the same metric expression. Programming options include imperative, vectorized, functional and SQL paradigms. The distributed system supports horizontal scaling, load balancing, fault tolerance, distributed transactions and high availability across data nodes, controllers, streaming and API clients. Deployment options include cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments. Listed use cases span finance, energy, power, transportation, industrial manufacturing and scientific research. The Community Edition has a free perpetual license, limited to two nodes, each with two CPU cores and 8 GB RAM. A free Enterprise Trial supports high-availability clusters and includes expert technical support. Related components include Swordfish for embedded use, Shark for GPU workloads, Starfish for quantitative research workflows and Octopus for complex event processing. The product is available through API, extension, Linux, self-hosted, web and Windows options.