DBMS > etcd vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison etcd vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed reliable key-value store

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

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

Primary database model

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational 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

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

Score	7.03
Rank	#54	Overall
	#5	Key-value stores

Score	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

etcd.io
github.com/etcd-io/etcd

www.kinetica.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

etcd.io/docs
github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/Documentation

docs.kinetica.com

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

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Kinetica

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2019

1992

2014

Current release

3.4, August 2019

7.1, August 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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, C++

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
Windows

experimental

Linux

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
JSON over HTTP

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes, watching key changes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Source-replica replication

yes

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

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

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

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

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