DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Citus vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Newts vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Citus vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Newts vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

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	2.02
Rank	#124	Overall
	#22	Document stores
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.07
Rank	#375	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

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

Website

drill.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

opennms.github.io/newts

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

docs.citusdata.com

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

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Microsoft

OpenNMS Group

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

2012

2010

2019

2014

2013

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

8.1, December 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

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

HTTP REST
Java API

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

C++

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

Java

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

based on Cassandra

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

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

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

yes

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

none

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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