DBMS > Apache Druid vs. Couchbase vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Apache Druid vs. Couchbase vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

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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 distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS
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	3.34
Rank	#88	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

druid.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

www.kinetica.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

docs.couchbase.com

docs.kinetica.com

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Couchbase, Inc.

Kinetica

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2011

2012

2019

Current release

29.0.1, April 2024

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

7.1, August 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache license v2

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

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

Java

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C, C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-less columns are supported

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL for querying

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

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

Automatic Sharding

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

yes

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

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

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

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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