DBMS > Firebase Realtime Database vs. MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Firebase Realtime Database vs. MarkLogic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. TimescaleDB

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.

Operational and transactional Enterprise NoSQL database

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store

Document store
Native XML DBMS
RDF store

as of version 7
Search engine

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Time Series 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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	5.92
Rank	#58	Overall
	#10	Document stores
	#1	Native XML DBMS
	#1	RDF stores
	#6	Search engines

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.marklogic.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.marklogic.com

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

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

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

MarkLogic Corp.

Microsoft

Timescale

Initial release

2012

2001

2019

1989

2017

Current release

11.0, December 2022

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Schema can be enforced

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL92

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Java API
Node.js Client API
ODBC
proprietary Optic API

Proprietary Query API, introduced with version 9
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL
WebDAV
XDBC
XQuery
XSLT

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

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

via XQuery or JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via Hadoop Connector, HDFS Direct Access and in-database MapReduce jobs

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

can act as a resource manager in an XA/JTA transaction

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, with Range Indexes

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Role-based access control at the document and subdocument levels

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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