DBMS > Datomic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Datomic vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. RethinkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Time Series DBMS

Document store

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

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.59
Rank	#150	Overall
	#69	Relational DBMS

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.74
Rank	#105	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Website

www.datomic.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

nsdb.io

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.datomic.com

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Cognitect

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2012

2014

2019

2017

2009

Current release

1.0.6735, June 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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

Java, Clojure

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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 properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

Clojure
Java

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

Java
Scala

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

By using transaction functions

JavaScript

yes

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

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

range based

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

recommended only for testing and development

User concepts

Access control

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

users and table-level permissions

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