DBMS > 4D vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

Developer

4D, Inc

Amazon

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

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.

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

JSON types

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 properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

JavaScript

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

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

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)

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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