DBMS > Citus vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OpenSearch vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OpenSearch vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

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

Vector DBMS

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

Score	2.15
Rank	#123	Overall
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	0.57
Rank	#250	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	15.65
Rank	#38	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	0.04
Rank	#373	Overall
	#57	Key-value stores

Website

www.citusdata.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

opensearch.org/docs/latest

Developer

Spotify

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2010

2014

2019

2021

2018

Current release

8.1, December 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

2.5.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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.

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.

Implementation language

Java

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

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

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Triggers

yes

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

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

yes

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

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomic execution of operations

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
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Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
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Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
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Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
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