DBMS > Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb vs. Postgres-XL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Key-value store
Wide column store

column oriented

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

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

cloud.google.com/bigtable

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

nsdb.io

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

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

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2015

2019

1989

2017

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public license

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++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

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

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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

Java
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

user defined functions

Triggers

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

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

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

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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