DBMS > ClickHouse vs. EXASOL vs. KeyDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. EXASOL vs. KeyDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

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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.

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

An ultra-fast, open source Key-value store fully compatible with Redis API, modules, and protocols

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

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

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

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	0.70
Rank	#229	Overall
	#32	Key-value stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.exasol.com

github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB
keydb.dev

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.keydb.dev

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

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Exasol

EQ Alpha Technology Ltd.

Microsoft

Initial release

2016

2000

2019

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

BSD-3

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.

Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
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.

Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets, bit arrays, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

by using the Redis Search module

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protoco

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

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

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Crystal
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Fancy
Go
Haskell
Haxe
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Prolog
Pure Data
Python
R
Rebol
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Swift
Tcl
Visual Basic

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Lua

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

key based and custom

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Strong eventual consistency with CRDTs

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Optimistic locking, atomic execution of commands blocks and scripts

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Configurable mechanisms for persistency via snapshots and/or operations logs

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, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

simple password-based access control and ACL

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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