DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OushuDB vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OushuDB vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A data warehouse powered by Apache HAWQ supporting descriptive analysis and advanced machine learning

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial 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	5.52
Rank	#59	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.10
Rank	#355	Overall
	#154	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.oushu.com/product/oushuDB

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

www.oushu.com/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Oushu

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2015

2014

2019

2001

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

4.0.1, August 2020

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

hosted

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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 properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

Full-featured ANSI SQL support

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

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

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

C
C++

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Triggers

JavaScript

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

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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.

User concepts

Access control

yes

using Azure authentication

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Kerberos, SSL and role based access

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