DBMS > CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google BigQuery vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google BigQuery vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	58.10
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#366	Overall
	#39	Time Series DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/bigquery

www.hawkular.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Community supported by Red Hat

Microsoft

Initial release

2005

2012

2010

2014

2019

Current release

3.3.3, December 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

via views

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

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

Supported programming languages

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

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

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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