DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NCache vs. Riak TS vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. NCache vs. Riak TS vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

Riak TS is a distributed NoSQL database optimized for time series data and based on Riak KV

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

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

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
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

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

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.94
Rank	#195	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Score	0.20
Rank	#319	Overall
	#27	Time Series DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/ts/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Alachisoft

Open Source, formerly Basho Technologies

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2019

2005

2015

2014

2001

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

5.3.3, April 2024

3.0.0, September 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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

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

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

restricted

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

yes, limited

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

Erlang

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Notifications

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Sharding

yes

Sharding

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

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 selectable consistency level

selectable replication factor

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

links between datasets can be stored

yes

Transaction concepts

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

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
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Competitive advantages

NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
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Typical application scenarios

NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
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Key customers

Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
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Market metrics

Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
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Licensing and pricing models

NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
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