DBMS > AlaSQL vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
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	0.51
Rank	#256	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#118	Relational DBMS

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.54
Rank	#252	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

sphinxsearch.com

splicemachine.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

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

sphinxsearch.com/docs

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Splice Machine

Initial release

2014

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2019

2001

2014

Current release

11.3.2, February 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.1, February 2023

3.1, March 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

JavaScript

C and C++

C++

Java

Server operating systems

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

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

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

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

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

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

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

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

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.

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
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Competitive advantages

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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Typical application scenarios

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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Key customers

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Market metrics

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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Licensing and pricing models

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
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