DBMS > Amazon CloudSearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon CloudSearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A hosted search engine service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.81
Rank	#137	Overall
	#12	Search engines

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

firebase.google.com/docs/database

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Amazon

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2019

2013

2017

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache 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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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 search fields are automatically indexed

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

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

C++ API
Java API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

yes

automatic partitioning across Amazon Search Instance as required

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

managed transparently by AWS

yes

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

yes

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

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

authentication via encrypted signatures

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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