DBMS > 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB vs. Trafodion

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB vs. Trafodion

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Apache Trafodion has been retired in 2021. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Transactional SQL-on-Hadoop DBMS

Primary database model

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

ravendb.net

trafodion.apache.org

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

ravendb.net/docs

trafodion.apache.org/documentation.html

Developer

4D, Inc

Microsoft

Hibernating Rhinos

Apache Software Foundation, originally developed by HP

Initial release

1984

2019

1989

2010

2014

Current release

v20, April 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.4, July 2022

2.3.0, February 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C++, Java

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

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

yes

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/ADO.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Java Stored Procedures

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

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.

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication

yes, via HBase

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

yes

via user defined functions and HBase

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Authorization levels configured per client per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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