DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. Spark SQL vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. Spark SQL vs. TerarkDB

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)

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

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
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	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

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

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

spark.apache.org/sql

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

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

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Elastic

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2010

2019

2013

2014

2016

Current release

8.6, January 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

8.11.4, April 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Scala

C++

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X
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

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 search fields are automatically indexed

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

yes

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

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