DBMS > Apache IoTDB vs. CrateDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Apache IoTDB vs. CrateDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An IoT native database with high performance for data management and analysis, deployable on the edge and the cloud and integrated with Hadoop, Spark and Flink

Distributed Database based on Lucene

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational 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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.31
Rank	#164	Overall
	#14	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.71
Rank	#227	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	111.41
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

iotdb.apache.org

cratedb.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sqlite.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

iotdb.apache.org/UserGuide/Master/QuickStart/QuickStart.html

cratedb.com/docs

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

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Crate

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

2018

2013

2019

2000

2017

Current release

1.1.0, April 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM (>= 1.8)

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

hosted

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

dynamic column types

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

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex 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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
Native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
Python
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions (Javascript)

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by time range) + vertical partitioning (by deviceId)

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication methods; using Raft/IoTConsensus algorithm to ensure strong/eventual data consistency among multiple replicas

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

yes

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

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Integration with Hadoop and Spark

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Strong Consistency with Raft

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

yes

rights management via user accounts

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
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Competitive advantages

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
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Typical application scenarios

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
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Key customers

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
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Market metrics

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
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Licensing and pricing models

See CrateDB pricing >
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