DBMS > EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Splunk vs. SwayDB

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

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Analytics Platform for Big Data

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.25
Rank	#120	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	829.80
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	88.71
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Score	0.04
Rank	#373	Overall
	#57	Key-value stores

Website

www.exasol.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

www.splunk.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

www.exasol.com/resources

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

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

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Exasol

Microsoft

Splunk Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2000

2019

1989

2003

2018

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition available

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

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

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

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

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

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

A 'Transaction' in Splunk has a different meaning: grouping related events into a single one for later searching

Atomic execution of operations

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

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