DBMS > EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OpenSearch vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison EXASOL vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OpenSearch vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

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

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Search engine

Relational DBMS

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

Vector DBMS

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

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	16.36
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.exasol.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.exasol.com/resources

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

opensearch.org/docs/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Exasol

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2000

2019

2021

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

2.5.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

Aiven for OpenSearch: Fully managed open source search and analytics suite. Out-of-the-box integrations get you up and running in a couple of clicks.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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

yes

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

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Lua
Python
R

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.