DBMS > InterSystems IRIS vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison InterSystems IRIS vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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	4.39
Rank	#81	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#44	Relational DBMS

Score	5.16
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

InterSystems

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2018

2019

2014

2001

Current release

2023.3, June 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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++

Server operating systems

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

depending on used data model

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

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

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

yes

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

yes

none

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate 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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

yes

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
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