DBMS > Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Quasardb vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Quasardb vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An online MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) data warehousing service based on Greenplum

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

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	0.68
Rank	#231	Overall
	#105	Relational DBMS

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/hybriddb-postgresql

www.exasol.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

quasar.ai

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/analyticdb-for-postgresql/latest/product-introduction-overview

www.exasol.com/resources

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

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba / Pivotal Software Inc. / PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Exasol

Microsoft

quasardb

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2000

2019

2009

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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

integer and binary

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

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

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

HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

Java
Lua
Python
R

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

consistent hashing

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

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

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