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

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics 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 managed big data interactive analytics platform

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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

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	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

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

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2019

2016

2014

Current release

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

C#
Java
PHP

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

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

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

yes

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

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