DBMS > Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. RethinkDB vs. Tarantool

System Properties Comparison Informix vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. RethinkDB vs. Tarantool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

In-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema for efficiently building high-performance applications

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

with Informix TimeSeries Extension

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

with Tarantool/GIS extension

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

Score	17.12
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

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

Score	76.78
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	2.66
Rank	#107	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	1.67
Rank	#143	Overall
	#25	Document stores
	#25	Key-value stores
	#65	Relational DBMS

Website

www.ibm.com/products/informix

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

rethinkdb.com

www.tarantool.io

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

rethinkdb.com/docs

www.tarantool.io/en/doc

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.

Microsoft

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

1984

2014

2010

2009

2008

Current release

14.10.FC5, November 2020

V12

2.4.1, August 2020

2.10.0, May 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

BSD-2, source-available extensions (modules), commercial licenses for Tarantool Enterprise

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++

C and C++

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Flexible data schema: relational definition for tables with ability to store json-like documents in columns

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Since Version 12.10 support for JSON/BSON datatypes

yes

JSON types

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

string, double, decimal, uuid, integer, blob, boolean, datetime

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 properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like query language

yes

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
JSON API

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

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Open binary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

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

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

C
C#
C++
Erlang
Go
Java
JavaScript
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Transact SQL

Lua, C and SQL stored procedures

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

yes, before/after data modification events, on replication events, client session events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

range based

Sharding, partitioned with virtual buckets by user defined affinity key. Live resharding for scale up and scale down without maintenance downtime.

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Source-replica replication

Asynchronous replication with multi-master option
Configurable replication topology (full-mesh, chain, star)
Synchronous quorum replication (with Raft)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Casual consistency across sharding partitions
Eventual consistency within replicaset partition

when using asyncronous replication
Immediate Consistency within single instance
Sequential consistency including linearizable read within replicaset partition

when using Raft

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

ACID

Atomic single-document operations

ACID, with serializable isolation and linearizable read (within partition); Configurable MVCC (within partition); No cross-shard distributed transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

yes, cooperative multitasking

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, write ahead logging

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

yes, full featured in-memory storage engine with persistence

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

users and table-level permissions

Access Control Lists
Mutual TLS authentication for Tarantol Enterprise
Password based authentication
Role-based access control (RBAC) and LDAP for Tarantol Enterprise
Users and Roles

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