DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. InfluxDB vs. Infobright vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. InfluxDB vs. Infobright vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

DBMS for storing time series, events and metrics

High performant column-oriented DBMS for analytic workloads using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a frontend

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

with GEO package

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	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	25.83
Rank	#28	Overall
	#1	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.96
Rank	#194	Overall
	#91	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-overview

ignitetech.com/softwarelibrary/infobrightdb

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.influxdata.com/influxdb

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

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

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Ignite Technologies Inc.; formerly InfoBright Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2013

2005

2019

1989

Current release

2.7.6, April 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

MIT-License; commercial enterprise version available

commercial

The open source (GPLv2) version did not support inserts/updates/deletes and was discontinued with July 2016

commercial

restricted free version is 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.

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X

through Homebrew

Linux
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data and Strings

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

Knowledge Grid Technology used instead

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API
JSON over UDP

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

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

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

.Net
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

Triggers

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

in enterprise version only

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

in enterprise version only

Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

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

Depending on used storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

simple rights management via user accounts

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

exploiting MySQL or PostgreSQL frontend capabilities

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

Fastest-growing database to drive 27,500 GitHub stars Over 750,000 daily active instances
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Licensing and pricing models

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