DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

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

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	821.56
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.54
Rank	#252	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

sphinxsearch.com

splicemachine.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

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

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

sphinxsearch.com/docs

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Splice Machine

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2019

1989

2001

2014

2018

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

3.1, March 2021

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

Open Source

GPL V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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Implementation language

C++

Java

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

Java

yes

Triggers

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

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

Graph Partitioning

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, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Journaling Streams

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

in-memory journaling

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

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