DBMS > GigaSpaces vs. Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison GigaSpaces vs. Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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	0.97
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.gigaspaces.com

cloud.google.com/bigquery

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Gigaspaces Technologies

Google

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2000

2010

2019

2014

2001

Current release

15.5, September 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence 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++, .Net

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, event driven architecture

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

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

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

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Role-based access control

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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