DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

SAP Advantage Database Server seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Low-cost RDBMS with access to ISAM and FoxPro data structures

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational 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

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

Score	0.49
Rank	#259	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#120	Relational DBMS

Score	0.57
Rank	#250	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sap.com/products/advantage-database-server.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Spotify

Microsoft

Sybase, SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

2019

1993

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

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

JavaScript

Java

Server operating systems

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

hosted

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

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

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

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

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

Delphi
Perl
PHP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

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.

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

yes

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate 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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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