DBMS > Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. NSDb

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Website

www.kinetica.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

docs.kinetica.com

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Kinetica

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2019

1989

2017

Current release

7.1, August 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

C, C++

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

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, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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 or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual 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

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles on table level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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