DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL vs. Sphinx vs. Weaviate

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used open source RDBMS

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

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Vector DBMS

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
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	1029.49
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.48
Rank	#149	Overall
	#8	Vector DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mysql.com

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2019

1995

2001

2019

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

9.0.0, July 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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 and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

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

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

proprietary syntax

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

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Sharding

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

Sharding

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.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

none

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

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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