DBMS > Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Postgres-XL vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Postgres-XL vs. SQLite vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

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

Score	4.48
Rank	#75	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

www.postgres-xl.org

www.sqlite.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

Timescale

Initial release

2014

2012

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2000

2017

Current release

10 R1, October 2018

3.46.0 (23 May 2024), May 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Public Domain

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

server-less

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

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

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

user defined functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

JavaScript

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

horizontal partitioning

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

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

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

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

optimistic locking

ACID

MVCC

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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