DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Key-value store

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	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

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

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

1992

2019

2013

2014

Current release

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

C++ API
Java API

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

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

yes

none

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

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

but no files for transaction logging

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

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)

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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