DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

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

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

Primary database model

column oriented

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	4.48
Rank	#75	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

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

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2019

2010

2012

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

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

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

yes

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

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

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

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

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. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

yes, with always 3 replicas available

yes

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

yes

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

optimistic locking

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

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

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