DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Datomic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. SWC-DB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Datomic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. SWC-DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

A high performance, scalable Wide Column DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Wide column store

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

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	1.59
Rank	#150	Overall
	#69	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.01
Rank	#376	Overall
	#13	Wide column stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.datomic.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

nsdb.io

github.com/kashirin-alex/swc-db
www.swcdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.datomic.com

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Cognitect

Microsoft

Alex Kashirin

Initial release

2012

2019

2017

2020

Current release

1.0.6735, June 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

0.5, April 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL V3

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

Java, Clojure

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol
Thrift

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Clojure
Java

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

Java
Scala

C++

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Transaction Functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

By using transaction functions

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

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

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

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

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

recommended only for testing and development

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.