DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Apache Impala vs. Infobright vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Apache Impala vs. Infobright vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

High performant column-oriented DBMS for analytic workloads using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a frontend

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

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	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	0.96
Rank	#194	Overall
	#91	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

impala.apache.org

ignitetech.com/softwarelibrary/infobrightdb

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Ignite Technologies Inc.; formerly InfoBright Inc.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2013

2005

2019

2014

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

The open source (GPLv2) version did not support inserts/updates/deletes and was discontinued with July 2016

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

restricted

yes

Knowledge Grid Technology used instead

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

exploiting MySQL or PostgreSQL frontend capabilities

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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