DBMS > IRONdb vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. RocksDB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison IRONdb vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NSDb vs. RocksDB vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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

Description

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

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	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	3.65
Rank	#85	Overall
	#11	Key-value stores

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

nsdb.io

rocksdb.org

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

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

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

nsdb.io/Architecture

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Circonus LLC.

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2017

2019

2017

2013

1992

Current release

V0.10.20, January 2018

cloud service with continuous releases

8.11.4, April 2024

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

BSD

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

Linux

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

C++ API
Java API

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

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

Java
Scala

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, in Lua

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

yes

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

yes

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

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

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

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

yes

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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