DBMS > IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL vs. NSDb vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL vs. NSDb vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Time Series DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	121.74
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	3.00
Rank	#87	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS

Score	1017.80
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#386	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.92
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

www.ibm.com/products/db2

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mysql.com

nsdb.io

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

nsdb.io/Architecture

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

IBM

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

1983

host version

2019

1995

2017

2001

Current release

12.1, October 2016

cloud service with continuous releases

9.0.0, July 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free version is available

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

C and C++

Java, Scala

C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
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

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Java
Scala

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

yes

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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