DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Elasticsearch 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.

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector 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	15.17
Rank	#37	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Score	130.82
Rank	#8	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	3.57
Rank	#81	Overall
	#44	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

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

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Elastic

Microsoft

Initial release

2016

2010

2019

Current release

v24.6.2.17-stable, July 2024

8.6, January 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Elastic License

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.

Implementation language

C++

Java

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

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.

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

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

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

Memcached and Redis integration

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.

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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