DBMS > ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. GBase vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. CouchDB vs. GBase vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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.

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	1.05
Rank	#186	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	19.93
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

couchdb.apache.org

www.gbase.cn

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Microsoft

Initial release

2016

2005

2004

2019

2016

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

3.3.3, December 2023

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

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.

ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.

Implementation language

C++

Erlang

C, Java, Python

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

via views

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

Standard with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

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

C#
Java
PHP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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 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.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

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