DBMS > IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SQLite vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison IBM Cloudant vs. Lovefield vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SQLite vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

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

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

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.29
Rank	#293	Overall
	#133	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

google.github.io/lovefield

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sqlite.org

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

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

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.stardog.com

Developer

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Google

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2010

2014

2019

2000

2010

Current release

2.1.12, February 2017

cloud service with continuous releases

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Public Domain

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

Erlang

JavaScript

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

hosted

server-less

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

dynamic column types

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

JavaScript

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

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

Using read-only observers

yes

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

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

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

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

Transaction concepts

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users and roles

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