DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NebulaGraph vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NebulaGraph vs. XTDB

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.

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A distributed, linear scalable, high perfomant Graph DBMS

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Graph DBMS

Document store

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	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	2.23
Rank	#116	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

clickhouse.com

google.github.io/lovefield

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

github.com/vesoft-inc/nebula
www.nebula-graph.io

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

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

docs.nebula-graph.io

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Microsoft

Vesoft Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2016

2014

2019

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

2.1.12, February 2017

cloud service with continuous releases

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0 + Common Clause 1.0

Open Source

MIT License

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++

JavaScript

C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Strong typed schema

schema-free

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

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

Nebula Graph internally uses the Key-Value store RocksDB for persistency. The vertices, edges, and their properties are stored as Key while their values are stored as Value. The primary indexes are per Key and secondary indexes are per Value.

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

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

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

Browser interface
console (shell)
Cypher Query Language
GO Object Graph Mapper
Java Object Graph Mapper
NGBatis

ORM framework for NebulaGraph and Spring-Boot
Proprietary native API
Python Object Graph Mapper
Query language nGQL

HTTP REST
JDBC

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

JavaScript

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

.Net
C++
Go
Java
PHP
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

Using read-only observers

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

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

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

none

yes

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

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

yes, each node contains all data

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

using RocksDB

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

using MemoryDB

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.

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Role-based access control

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

NebulaGraph is a truly distributed, linearly scalable, lightning-fast graph database,...
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Competitive advantages

NebulaGraph boasts the world's only graph database solution that is able to host...
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Typical application scenarios

Social networking Fraud detection Knowledge graph Data warehouse management Anti...
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Key customers

Companies from a variety of industries have implemented NebulaGraph Database in production,...
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Market metrics

At our very early stage, NebulaGraph has already received over 10,000 stars on GitHub...
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Licensing and pricing models

NebulaGraph is open source and free to use under Apache 2.0 license.
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