DBMS > Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Realm vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Realm vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Document store

Relational 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

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

Score	58.10
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.17
Rank	#334	Overall
	#148	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigquery

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

realm.io

spark.apache.org/sql

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

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

realm.io/docs

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

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Apache Software Foundation

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2010

2019

2014

1987

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free development license

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

Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

Java
Python
R
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

yes

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Change Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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.

none

Source-replica replication

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

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

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

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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