DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Primary database model

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

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Website

impala.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

ravendb.net

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

firebase.google.com/docs/database

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

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

ravendb.net/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Hibernating Rhinos

Initial release

2013

2012

2019

1989

2010

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.4, July 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

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++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

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-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (RQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

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

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

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

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

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

yes

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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