DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. RRDtool

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. RRDtool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial 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	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.87
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

nsdb.io

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Microsoft

Tobias Oetiker

Initial release

2012

2014

2019

2017

1999

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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, Scala

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

Numeric data only

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

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

in-process shared library
Pipes

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Java
Scala

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

JavaScript

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

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

none

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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