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Tablestore:What are the differences between Tablestore and traditional database services such as MySQL and SQL Server?

Last Updated:Jan 20, 2025

Tablestore is a cost-effective table-based serverless storage service that can be used to store large volumes of structured data. Tablestore allows you to query and retrieve online data within milliseconds and perform multi-dimensional analysis on stored data. Tablestore is suitable for scenarios such as billing, instant messaging (IM), IoT, Internet of Vehicles (IoV), risk control, and intelligent recommendation. Tablestore provides a deeply optimized all-in-one storage solution for IoT applications. Tablestore differs from traditional relational database services such as MySQL and SQL Server in terms of data models, scalability, supported features, and O&M management.

The following table describes the differences between Tablestore and traditional relational database services.

Item

Relational database services

Tablestore

Data model

  • Have a rigid schema and use a two-dimensional structure consisting of rows and columns to organize data.

  • The schema of each row is the same.

  • Is schema-free and uses a three-dimensional structure consisting of rows, columns, and time to organize data.

  • The attribute columns of each row can be different. You can dynamically add or remove attribute columns.

Scalability

  • Scaling is performed by scaling up the hardware resources, such as CPU and memory resources of a single server. It is difficult to scale out resources.

  • Seamless scaling of storage resources is performed by using the sharding and load balancing technologies. The storage of hundreds of TBs of data and concurrent access as high as 100,000 queries per second (QPS) to a single table are supported.

Supported features

  • Support the view, index, and transaction features.

  • Ensure the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) semantics.

  • Supports the secondary index, search index, local transaction, time to live (TTL), and max versions features.

  • Ensures eventual consistency in most cases and supports strong consistency under specific conditions.

O&M management

  • Manual deployment and maintenance of software and hardware resources are required. The maintenance of software and hardware resources is complex.

  • You must take hardware investment, software license fees, and long-term O&M costs into consideration.

  • Supports automatic software and hardware provisioning, configuration, error handling, cluster scaling, and security handling. You can focus on developing your applications.

  • You only need to activate Tablestore and pay for the consumed storage and computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Access method

  • SQL statements

  • Provides API operations that developers can call to access Tablestore by using various programming languages such as Java, Go, and Python.

  • Provides the SQL query feature that is compatible with the query syntax of MySQL.