DBMS > MaxDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison MaxDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

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	2.26
Rank	#114	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

maxdb.sap.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

1984

2019

2014

Current release

7.9.10.12, February 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Limited community edition free

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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++

Scala

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

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

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

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