DBMS > CrateDB vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison CrateDB vs. EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Distributed Database based on Lucene

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Relational 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	0.69
Rank	#226	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#11	Vector DBMS

Score	1.66
Rank	#138	Overall
	#64	Relational DBMS

Score	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	807.76
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

cratedb.com

www.exasol.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

Technical documentation

cratedb.com/docs

www.exasol.com/resources

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

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

Developer

Crate

Exasol

Microsoft

Initial release

2013

2000

2019

1989

Current release

5.8.1, August 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

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, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

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

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

Supported programming languages

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

Java
Lua
Python
R

.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

user defined functions (Javascript)

user defined functions

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

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

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

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

yes

Hadoop integration

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Read-after-write consistency on record level

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

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

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

User concepts

Access control

rights management via user accounts

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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