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

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RRDtool 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

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.

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

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	1.87
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#382	Overall
	#59	Key-value stores

Website

www.citusdata.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

Spotify

Microsoft

Tobias Oetiker

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2010

2014

2019

1999

2018

Current release

8.1, December 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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.

Implementation language

Java

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

Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

Numeric data only

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

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

yes

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

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

in-process shared library
Pipes

Supported programming languages

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

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

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

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

Triggers

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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.

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

none

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

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

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Related products and services

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Time Series DBMS are the database category with the fastest increase in popularity
4 July 2016, Matthias Gelbmann

Time Series DBMS as a new trend?
1 June 2015, Paul Andlinger

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