DBMS > InfluxDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Adaptive Server vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison InfluxDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Adaptive Server vs. Snowflake vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

DBMS for storing time series, events and metrics

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

The SAP (Sybase) Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is an enterprise-class RDBMS

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

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

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

with GEO package

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

Spatial DBMS

with Boeing's Spatial Query Server

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

Score	24.39
Rank	#28	Overall
	#1	Time Series DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	35.09
Rank	#25	Overall
	#17	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-overview

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-ase.html

www.snowflake.com

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

docs.influxdata.com/influxdb

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

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_ASE

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Microsoft

SAP, Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2013

2019

1987

2014

2010

Current release

2.7.6, April 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

16.0

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License; commercial enterprise version available

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

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X

through Homebrew

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

Numeric data and Strings

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

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

APIs and other access methods

HTTP API
JSON over UDP

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

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

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

C
C++
Cobol
Java
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Java and Transact-SQL

user defined functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

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

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

in enterprise version only

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

in enterprise version only

yes

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

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

ACID

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

Depending on used storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

simple rights management via user accounts

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB , the open source time series database. It...
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Competitive advantages

Time to Value InfluxDB is available in all the popular languages and frameworks,...
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Typical application scenarios

IoT & Sensor Monitoring Developers are witnessing the instrumentation of every available...
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Key customers

InfluxData has more than 1,900 paying customers, including customers include MuleSoft,...
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Market metrics

Fastest-growing database to drive 27,500 GitHub stars Over 750,000 daily active instances
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Licensing and pricing models

Open source core with closed source clustering available either on-premise or on...
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News

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Webinar Recap: Unleash the Full Potential of Your Time Series Data with InfluxDB and AWS
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.