DBMS > 4D vs. Amazon Redshift vs. Heroic vs. LeanXcale vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Amazon Redshift vs. Heroic vs. LeanXcale vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

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

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

A highly scalable full ACID SQL database with fast NoSQL data ingestion and GIS capabilities

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store
Relational 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	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.36
Rank	#280	Overall
	#40	Key-value stores
	#129	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

aws.amazon.com/redshift

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.leanxcale.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

Developer

4D, Inc

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Spotify

LeanXcale

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

2012

2014

2015

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

restricted

yes

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

through Apache Derby

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

JDBC
ODBC

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
proprietary key/value interface
Spark Connector

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

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
Java
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

in Python

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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