DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Apache Drill vs. ClickHouse vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Apache Drill vs. ClickHouse vs. H2 vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

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

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

drill.apache.org/docs

clickhouse.com/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

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

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Apache Software Foundation

Clickhouse Inc.

Thomas Mueller

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2012

2016

2005

2019

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

2.2.220, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Database as a Service

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Implementation language

JavaScript

C++

Java

Server operating systems

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

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

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

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

C++

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

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

key based and custom

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

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

yes

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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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