DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Rockset vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Rockset vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Document store

Graph DBMS

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

Relational DBMS
Search engine

Document store
RDF store

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	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.79
Rank	#211	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/redshift

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rockset.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

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

docs.rockset.com

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Microsoft

Rockset

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2014

2012

2019

2018

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

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

C++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

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

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

dynamic typing

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

ingestion from XML files supported

Secondary indexes

restricted

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

JDBC
ODBC

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

HTTP REST

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

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

Automatic sharding

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

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

yes

Journaling Streams

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

none

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

in-memory journaling

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

Role-based access control

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