DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. Teradata Aster

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. Teradata Aster

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Teradata Aster has been integrated into other Teradata systems and therefore will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

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

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

Platform for big data analytics on multistructured data sources and types

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

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	16.88
Rank	#35	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

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

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.ibm.com/products/informix

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

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

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

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

Facebook, Inc.

Teradata

Initial release

2012

1984

2019

2013

2005

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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, C++ and Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

defined schema within the relational store; partial schema or schema free in the Aster File Store

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

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

in Aster File Store

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
JSON API

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

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

C++ API
Java API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Java
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

R packages

Triggers

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes

Dimension tables are replicated across all nodes in the cluster. The number of replicas for the file store can be configured.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

yes

SQL Map-Reduce Framework

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

yes

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

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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