DBMS > Altibase vs. Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP HANA vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP HANA vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

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

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.07
Rank	#186	Overall
	#87	Relational DBMS

Score	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

altibase.com

www.ibm.com/products/informix

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

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

help.sap.com/hana

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Altibase

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

1999

1984

2019

2010

1992

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

14.10.FC5, November 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

C++

C, C++ and Java

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Appliance or cloud-service

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

SQLScript, R

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

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

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

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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