DBMS > AlaSQL vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Document store
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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Website

alasql.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

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

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2010

2019

1989

2017

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Erlang

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

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

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

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

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

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

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

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

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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