DBMS > ClickHouse vs. FeatureBase vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. FeatureBase vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Sphinx

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.

Real-time database platform that powers real-time analytics and machine learning applications by simultaneously executing low-latency, high-throughput, and highly concurrent workloads.

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Search engine

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS
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	0.31
Rank	#292	Overall
	#135	Relational DBMS

Score	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

clickhouse.com

www.featurebase.com

www.kinetica.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.featurebase.com

docs.kinetica.com

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

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Molecula and Pilosa Open Source Contributors

Kinetica

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2016

2017

2012

2019

2001

Current release

v24.4.2.141-stable, June 2024

2022, May 2022

7.1, August 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

C, C++

C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS

Linux

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

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

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 fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL queries

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

gRPC
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Proprietary protocol

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
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

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

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

yes

Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using Linux fsync

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

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 and roles on table level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.