Comparisons

SingleStore vs.
MySQL

If you're running into performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges or the inability to handle modern, real-time analytics workloads with MySQL, it's time to consider SingleStore.

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Overview	SingleStore	MySQL
Database model	Relational DBMS	Relational DBMS
DBaaS offering	SingleStore Helios	MySQL Database Service

Real-time analytics	SingleStore	MySQL
Data ingest	"The first database with true linear shared-nothing scalability, enabling essentially unlimited scale, proven from three leading industry benchmarks: TPC-C, TPC-H, and TPC-DS."	Architecture is not designed to handle analytics on rapidly changing real-time data.
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Why MySQL shouldn't be your SQL database

Unlike part one, this SeQueL is better.

Performance at scale

MySQL's InnoDB (the default engine) uses row-level locking, which generally improves concurrency but encounters DEADLOCK or lock contention under heavy workloads.

SingleStore's distributed architecture delivers high-performance SQL analytics on large datasets, enabling sub-second query times — even at scale.

Unified workloads

SingleStore supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP), allowing you to run transactional and analytical workloads on the same data — no need for unnecessary data movement or complex ETL pipelines.

Real-time analytics

Where MySQL requires additional tools for real-time analytics, SingleStore offers native real-time capabilities, ensuring low-latency insights for time-sensitive applications.

Built for modern applications

While MySQL may not natively support advanced geospatial features, built-in machine learning, or vector data types for AI, SingleStore provides powerful JSON and geospatial functionality, robust machine learning integration support for vector data types and seamless data streaming.

These capabilities empower developers to build truly intelligent, data-driven applications.

Scalability without limits

MySQL's core scalability option Replication (master → replica) is complex and tricky to manage for automatic failover, data consistency and ensuring up-to-date replicas.

SingleStore's distributed design allows for seamless horizontal scaling — without manual intervention.

Schema changes and migrations

Altering large tables or adding/dropping columns can lock tables and disrupt production traffic. Frequent schema changes, which are common in agile development, can lead to downtime or degraded performance.

SingleStore schema changes operations are online and can be achieved even in production workloads.

Backup and restore

As data sets grow, MySQL's backup/restore times (especially logical) can become an operational challenge.

SingleStore offers a more distributed, parallel backup/restore workflow, significantly reducing downtime and time-to-recovery for large-scale, high-throughput environments.

Don't just take our word for it

We are now all in on SingleStore Helios, which has allowed us to drop Redis, DynamoDB and MySQL, saving us an absolute fortune in monthly costs while dramatically improving performance.

Jack Ellis

Co-Founder and CEO, Fathom Analytics

With SingleStore we've achieved 24x faster response times and a 75% reduction in total cost of ownership

Kannan Balasubramanian

Senior Software Engineer, ZoomInfo

We were able to build more confidence in our ability to provide a platform we could grow with that could operate cost-effectively at scale. SingleStore struck the right balance of performance, cost, expressiveness and partnership.

Molly Shelestak

Principal Product Manager, Heap by Contentsquare

We considered MariaDB and NoSQL databases, as well as Oracle Database in-memory. What we wanted was a relational database that had the speed of NoSQL. We chose SingleStore.

Himanshu Gupta

Director of Information Technologies, Dell Technologies