DBMS > CockroachDB vs. Graph Engine vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison CockroachDB vs. Graph Engine vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial 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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	6.15
Rank	#55	Overall
	#33	Relational DBMS

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

www.cockroachlabs.com

www.graphengine.io

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

Technical documentation

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

docs.heavy.ai

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

Developer

Cockroach Labs

Microsoft

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2015

2010

2016

2019

1989

Current release

23.1.1, May 2023

5.10, January 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

.NET and C

C++ and CUDA

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS
Windows

.NET

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

dynamic schema

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

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication using RAFT

Multi-source replication

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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

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

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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