DBMS > Couchbase vs. dBASE vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Couchbase vs. dBASE vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

dBase was one of the first databases with a development environment on PC's. Its latest version dBase V is still sold as dBase classic, which needs a DOS Emulation. The up-to-date product is dBase plus.

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

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Vector 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	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	10.34
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

www.couchbase.com

www.dbase.com

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

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.couchbase.com

www.dbase.com/support/knowledgebase

docs.heavy.ai

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

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

Developer

Couchbase, Inc.

Asthon Tate

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2011

1979

2016

2015

2019

Current release

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

dBASE 2019, 2019

5.10, January 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

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

C, C++, Go and Erlang

C++ and CUDA

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

DOS

dBase Classic
Windows

dBase Pro

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

none

The IDE can access other DBMS or ODBC-sources.

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

dBase proprietary IDE

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

The IDE can access stored procedures in other database systems.

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

Multi-source replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for dBase internal data, but IDE does support transactions when accessing external DBMS

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

User concepts

Access control

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Access rights for users and roles

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

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.