What is better H2 or HSQLDB?

Question

HSQLDB 2.0 will be released soon. I wonder if it will surpass H2 because, as far as I know, most users prefer H2 over HSQLDB. I'm interested in MVCC HSQLDB 2.0 support. I found out that MVCC on H2 is still experimental. Regarding support / documentation, concurrency, which performance is better between the two?

Answer 1

Please note that I provided this answer in 2011. Maybe it's out of date

My company is developing a database abstraction library ( jOOQ ) that supports both databases. Our integration tests cover many features, including calling stored procedures and functions, arrays, nested samples, etc. I believe that HSQLDB 2.1 slightly faster than H2 1.3 for small databases with regard to DML.

However, HSQLDB is significantly superior to H2 in DDL operations, as well as when starting / shutting down an instance even for a small database (due to the fact that H2 compiles the stored functions again with javac every time the database starts!) . It depends on how you store the stored functions. This seems to be a pretty jOOQ-specific “problem,” see also Thomas Muller's comment.

On the other hand, I agree with the trashgod user, you should check the performance against a reasonable design and usage scenario for yourself.

Answer 2

Both HyperSQL and H2 Database are fairly transparent, so testing may be the best approach to determine which is more suitable for a particular use. Comparisons with one and others are available . They have a common heritage , and both are open source .