DBMS > Informix vs. IRONdb vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

System Properties Comparison Informix vs. IRONdb vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

A secure embeddable database from IBM, positioned besides IBM Db2 as a relatively low-cost product optimized for OLTP and Internet of Things data

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes compatible with MongoDB

Time Series DBMS

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Website

www.ibm.com/products/informix

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

Technical documentation

informix.hcldoc.com
www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G/welcomeIfxServers.html

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

Developer

IBM, HCL Technologies

Effective May 1st, 2017, HCL took on development, technical support, and product management teams, and works jointly with IBM on product strategy, marketing, and sales.

Circonus LLC.

Microsoft

Initial release

1984

2017

2015

2014

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

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, C++ and Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

text, numeric, histograms

yes

JSON types

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
JSON API

MongoDB compatible
MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes, in Lua

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

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

Users with fine-grained authentication, authorization, and auditing controls

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

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