DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. GBase vs. Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. GBase vs. Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

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	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	1.07
Rank	#185	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.citusdata.com

www.gbase.cn

hazelcast.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.citusdata.com

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

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

Developer

Amazon

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Hazelcast

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2010

2004

2008

2019

Current release

8.1, December 2018

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

5.3.6, November 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

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, Java, Python

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

the object must implement a serialization strategy

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

user defined functions

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Events

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

Replicated Map

yes

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

ACID

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

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

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Role-based access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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