DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Firebird vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. VoltDB

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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.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

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	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.firebirdsql.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2016

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2019

2010

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

5.0.0, January 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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 and C++

Java, C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

for development

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

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

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

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON 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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Java

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

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Multi-source replication
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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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.

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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