DBMS > GridGain vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison GridGain vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Neo4j vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

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

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

Score	1.55
Rank	#150	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	44.89
Rank	#21	Overall
	#1	Graph DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.gridgain.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

neo4j.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

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

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

neo4j.com/docs

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Microsoft

Neo4j, Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2007

2019

1989

2007

2019

Current release

GridGain 8.5.1

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.20, May 2024

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version3, commercial licenses available

Open Source

MIT 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

Java, C++, .Net

C++

Java, Scala

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

Can also be used server-less as embedded Java database.
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free and schema-optional

schema-free

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, extensible-data-notation format

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

pluggable indexing subsystem, by default Apache Lucene

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

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

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

Bolt protocol
Cypher query language
Java API
Neo4j-OGM

Object Graph Mapper
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data Neo4j
TinkerPop 3

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

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

.Net
Clojure
Elixir
Go
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

yes

User defined Procedures and Functions

Triggers

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

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

yes

via event handler

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 using Neo4j Fabric

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes (replicated cache)

yes

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

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Causal Clustering using Raft protocol

available in in Enterprise Version only

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

Causal and Eventual Consistency configurable in Causal Cluster setup
Immediate Consistency in stand-alone mode

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Security Hooks for custom implementations

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users, roles and permissions. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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