DBMS > 4D vs. Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Fauna vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Alibaba Cloud Table Store vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Fauna vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A fully managed Wide Column Store for large quantities of semi-structured data with real-time access

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Document store
Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

If a column is of type dynamic docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types/dynamic then it's possible to add arbitrary JSON documents in this cell
Event Store

this is the general usage pattern at Microsoft. Billing, Logs, Telemetry events are stored in ADX and the state of an individual entity is defined by the arg_max(timestamps)
Spatial DBMS
Search engine

support for complex search expressions docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/parseoperator FTS, Geospatial docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/geo-point-to-geohash-function distributed search -> ADX acts as a distributed search engine
Time Series DBMS

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer/time-series-analysis

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	0.26
Rank	#301	Overall
	#12	Wide column stores

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

www.alibabacloud.com/product/table-store

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

fauna.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/tablestore

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.fauna.com

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-explorer

Developer

4D, Inc

Alibaba

Amazon

Fauna, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

2016

2012

2014

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Scala

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Microsoft SQL Server communication protocol (MS-TDS)
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

Java
Python

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Access rights based on subaccounts and tokens

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identity management, authentication, and access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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