DBMS > Apache Drill vs. ClickHouse vs. EDB Postgres vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. ClickHouse vs. EDB Postgres vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

The EDB Postgres Platform is an enterprise-class data management platform based on the open source database PostgreSQL with flexible deployment options and Oracle compatibility features, complemented by tool kits for management, integration, and migration.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Search engine

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
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	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#135	Overall
	#63	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

drill.apache.org

clickhouse.com

www.enterprisedb.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

clickhouse.com/docs

www.enterprisedb.com/docs

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

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Clickhouse Inc.

EnterpriseDB

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2012

2016

2005

2019

2001

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

14, December 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

BSD for PostgreSQL-components

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
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ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

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

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

standard with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

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

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

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C++

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

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

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning

by hash, list or range

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source 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

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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