DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Firebird vs. Hazelcast vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Firebird vs. Hazelcast vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

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	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

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

Score	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.firebirdsql.org

hazelcast.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Firebird Foundation

Hazelcast

Spotify

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2008

2014

2019

Current release

5.0.0, January 2024

5.3.6, November 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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 and C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.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

in Python

PSQL

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

Events

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

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

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Eventual 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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Role-based access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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