DBMS > Citus vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Citus vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Transbase

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

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

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

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

www.citusdata.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

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

Technical documentation

docs.citusdata.com

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

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

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2010

2019

2014

1987

Current release

8.1, December 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also 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

C and C++

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native 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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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