DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

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

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

Score	12.45
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	4.04
Rank	#77	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

impala.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

www.snowflake.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2013

2019

2012

2014

2019

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

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

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

yes

yes, each node contains all data

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

optimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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