DBMS > Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. SQream DB vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Memcached vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. SQream DB vs. TimesTen

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

a GPU-based, columnar RDBMS for big data analytics workloads

An in-memory SQL relational database that delivers microsecond response and high throughput for OLTP applications. TimesTen can be deployed as a standalone database or as a cache to a backend Oracle database.

Primary database model

Key-value store

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	16.84
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.62
Rank	#234	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	1.26
Rank	#164	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Website

www.memcached.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

sqream.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.sqream.com

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/timesten/index.html

Developer

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

SQream Technologies

Oracle

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2003

2019

2014

2017

1998

Current release

1.6.29, June 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

2022.1.6, December 2022

Release 22.1

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

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++, CUDA, Haskell, Java, Scala

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

hosted

Linux

IBM AIX Power PC 64-bit
Linux arm64
Linux x86-64
Solaris SPARC 64
Solaris SPARC/x86
Solaris x86-64

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes, ANSI Standard SQL 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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.Net
JDBC
ODBC

ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)
Pro*C/C++ programming interfaces
SQL and PL/SQL via JDBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Java
Node.js
PL/SQL
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

user defined functions in Python

PL/SQL

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

horizontal and vertical partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

yes

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

yes

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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