DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Spark SQL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

www.kinetica.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.kinetica.com

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

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

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Kinetica

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2019

2014

Current release

7.1, August 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

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, C++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

restricted

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

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

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Source-replica replication

yes

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

none

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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