DBMS > Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. EXASOL vs. Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

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	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

www.exasol.com

hazelcast.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

www.exasol.com/resources

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Exasol

Hazelcast

Microsoft

Initial release

2013

2000

2008

2014

2019

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

5.3.6, November 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses 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

C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Java
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

user defined functions

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

Events

JavaScript

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

Replicated Map

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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