DBMS > Databricks vs. DuckDB vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

System Properties Comparison Databricks vs. DuckDB vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

The Databricks Lakehouse Platform combines elements of data lakes and data warehouses to provide a unified view onto structured and unstructured data. It is based on Apache Spark.

An embeddable, in-process, column-oriented SQL OLAP RDBMS

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	99.29
Rank	#12	Overall
	#2	Document stores
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	7.39
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	14.36
Rank	#36	Overall
	#22	Relational DBMS

Website

www.databricks.com

duckdb.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

Technical documentation

docs.databricks.com

duckdb.org/docs

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

Developer

Databricks

Microsoft

Initial release

2013

2018

2016

Current release

1.0.0, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

server-less

hosted

Data scheme

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

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

SQL

Support of SQL

with Databricks SQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC)
CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Python
R
Scala

C
C#

3rd party driver
C++
Crystal

3rd party driver
Go

3rd party driver
Java
Lisp

3rd party driver
Python
R
Ruby

3rd party driver
Rust
Swift
Zig

3rd party driver

C#
Java
PHP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions and aggregates

Transact SQL

Triggers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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

yes

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