DBMS > Apache Druid vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SwayDB vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Apache Druid vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SwayDB vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Open-source analytics data store designed for sub-second OLAP queries on high dimensionality and high cardinality data

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.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Key-value store

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Time Series 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	3.25
Rank	#90	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#387	Overall
	#61	Key-value stores

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

druid.apache.org

clickhouse.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

swaydb.simer.au

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

clickhouse.com/docs

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

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Clickhouse Inc.

Microsoft

Simer Plaha

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2012

2016

2019

2018

2019

Current release

29.0.1, April 2024

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache license v2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

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.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-less columns are supported

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

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

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL for querying

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

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

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

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
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PowerShell
Python
R

Java
Kotlin
Scala

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

manual/auto, time-based

key based and custom

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

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

yes

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

none

yes

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic execution of operations

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

RBAC using LDAP or Druid internals for users and groups for read/write by datasource and system

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.

Azure Active Directory Authentication

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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