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

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

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

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

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	2.25
Rank	#120	Overall
	#57	Relational DBMS

Score	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	4.00
Rank	#84	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#377	Overall
	#58	Key-value stores

Website

www.exasol.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

www.snowflake.com

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

www.exasol.com/resources

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Exasol

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2000

2019

2013

2014

2016

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

8.11.4, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

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

C++ API
Java API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

Java
Lua
Python
R

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

horizontal partitioning

yes

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

none

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

yes

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

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