DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL vs. RRDtool vs. ScyllaDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL vs. RRDtool vs. ScyllaDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used open source RDBMS

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Time Series DBMS

Wide column store

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
Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	1.87
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.75
Rank	#68	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Website

impala.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mysql.com

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.scylladb.com

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.scylladb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Tobias Oetiker

ScyllaDB

Initial release

2013

2019

1995

1999

2015

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

8.4.0, April 2024

1.8.0, 2022

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

C and C++

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

Linux

Data scheme

yes

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

Numeric data only

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

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

in-process shared library
Pipes

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

proprietary syntax

yes, Lua

Triggers

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

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

none

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.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

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

none

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

in-memory tables

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

Access rights for users can be defined per object

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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