DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Splunk

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Splunk

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Analytics Platform for Big Data

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	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	86.45
Rank	#14	Overall
	#2	Search engines

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

www.splunk.com

Technical documentation

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

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

SAP

formerly Sybase

Splunk Inc.

Initial release

2010

2019

2013

1992

2003

Current release

8.6, January 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

8.11.4, April 2024

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Limited free edition and free developer edition 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

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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 search fields are automatically indexed

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

Splunk Search Processing Language for search commands

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

C++ API
Java API

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

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

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

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

horizontal partitioning

none

Sharding

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

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

ACID

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

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

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