DBMS > Apache Drill vs. JaguarDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. JaguarDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Performant, highly scalable DBMS for AI and IoT applications

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Vector DBMS

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

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores
	#13	Vector DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

drill.apache.org

www.jaguardb.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

www.jaguardb.com/support.html

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

DataJaguar, Inc.

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2015

2019

2016

2014

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

3.3 July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

GPL V3.0

commercial

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++

the server part. Clients available in other languages

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

but no views, foreign keys, triggers

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C++

C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

C#
Java
PHP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

yes

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

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

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

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

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

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

rights management via user accounts

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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