DBMS > Derby vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB

System Properties Comparison Derby vs. Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Access vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Document store
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	4.60
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	101.16
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	3.41
Rank	#86	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Website

db.apache.org/derby

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

Technical documentation

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Elastic

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Initial release

1997

2010

1992

2019

2013

Current release

10.17.1.0, November 2023

8.6, January 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

cloud service with continuous releases

9.2.1, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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 search fields are automatically indexed

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

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

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

Java

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

none

yes

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

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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