DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Riak TS

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Citus vs. Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Riak TS

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

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

Riak TS is a distributed NoSQL database optimized for time series data and based on Riak KV

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

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

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	17.87
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.20
Rank	#319	Overall
	#27	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.citusdata.com

www.ibm.com/products/informix

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

docs.citusdata.com

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

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

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/ts/latest

Developer

Amazon

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

Open Source, formerly Basho Technologies

Initial release

2012

2010

1984

2019

2015

Current release

8.1, December 2018

14.10.FC5, November 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

3.0.0, September 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

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, C++ and Java

Erlang

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

restricted

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes, limited

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
JSON API

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

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

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

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

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

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Erlang

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

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

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

links between datasets can be stored

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

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

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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