DBMS > Apache Druid vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SpaceTime vs. Splunk

System Properties Comparison Apache Druid vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. SpaceTime vs. Splunk

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Analytics Platform for Big Data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

column oriented

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	86.45
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Website

druid.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

www.mireo.com/spacetime

www.splunk.com

Technical documentation

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Microsoft

Mireo

Splunk Inc.

Initial release

2012

2019

1989

2020

2003

Current release

29.0.1, April 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache license v2

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-less columns are supported

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

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 for querying

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C#
C++
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

manual/auto, time-based

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Fixed-grid hypercubes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Access rights for users and roles

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