DBMS > IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. Snowflake vs. SpaceTime

System Properties Comparison IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. Snowflake vs. SpaceTime

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

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

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

column oriented

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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	125.90
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.03
Rank	#392	Overall
	#8	Spatial DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/db2

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

nsdb.io

www.snowflake.com

www.mireo.com/spacetime

Technical documentation

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

IBM

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Mireo

Initial release

1983

host version

2019

2017

2014

2020

Current release

12.1, October 2016

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free version is available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

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

Linux
macOS

hosted

Linux

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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: 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

Secondary indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

yes

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

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

Java
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

Fixed-grid hypercubes

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.

yes

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

Using Apache Lucene

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

yes

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