DBMS > 4D vs. Amazon Redshift vs. GigaSpaces vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RRDtool

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Amazon Redshift vs. GigaSpaces vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RRDtool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	1.03
Rank	#188	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.gigaspaces.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

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

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

4D, Inc

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Gigaspaces Technologies

Microsoft

Tobias Oetiker

Initial release

1984

2012

2000

2019

1999

Current release

v20, April 2023

15.5, September 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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

Java, C++, .Net

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

Numeric data only

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

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

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

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

yes, event driven architecture

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

yes

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

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.