DBMS > Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure AI Search vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Snowflake

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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

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

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

Primary database model

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

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

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2015

2014

2010

2014

Current release

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

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++

Server operating systems

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON 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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

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

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

JavaScript

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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, with always 3 replicas available

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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