DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon CloudSearch vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Apache Drill vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon CloudSearch vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Apache Drill vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

A hosted search engine service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

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

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Key-value store

Document 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	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	1.85
Rank	#137	Overall
	#12	Search engines

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

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

drill.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

drill.apache.org/docs

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

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2012

2019

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

JavaScript

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

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 search fields are automatically indexed

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

automatic partitioning across Amazon Search Instance as required

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

managed transparently by AWS

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)

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Depending on the underlying data source

User concepts

Access control

authentication via encrypted signatures

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

Depending on the underlying data source

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.