DBMS > Apache Phoenix vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Rockset

System Properties Comparison Apache Phoenix vs. ClickHouse vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Rockset

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A scale-out RDBMS with evolutionary schema built on Apache HBase

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Document store

Secondary database models

Time Series 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
Search engine

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

Score	1.97
Rank	#126	Overall
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.79
Rank	#211	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Website

phoenix.apache.org

clickhouse.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rockset.com

Technical documentation

phoenix.apache.org

clickhouse.com/docs

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

docs.rockset.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Clickhouse Inc.

Microsoft

Rockset

Initial release

2014

2016

2019

Current release

5.0-HBase2, July 2018 and 4.15-HBase1, December 2019

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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.

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

dynamic typing

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

ingestion from XML files supported

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

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

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

key based and custom

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Automatic sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

yes

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

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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 Control Lists (using HBase ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC, multi-tenancy

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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