DBMS > EXASOL vs. HBase vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison EXASOL vs. HBase vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

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	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Website

www.exasol.com

hbase.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

www.exasol.com/resources

hbase.apache.org/book.html

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Exasol

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2000

2008

2019

2014

2016

Current release

2.3.4, January 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted open source version available

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

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Coprocessors in Java

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual 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

ACID

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

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

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

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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