DBMS > Apache Kylin vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Apache Kylin vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Transbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed analytics engine for big data, providing a SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) and leveraging the Hadoop stack

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

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

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

Score	1.18
Rank	#172	Overall
	#79	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

kylin.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

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

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

kylin.apache.org/docs

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

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

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation, originally contributed from eBay Inc

Microsoft

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2015

2019

2016

1989

1987

Current release

3.1.0, July 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

free development license

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

Java

C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

ANSI SQL for queries (using Apache Calcite)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
PHP

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

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

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

yes

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

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

yes

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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