DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OpenSearch vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine vs. SurrealDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. OpenSearch vs. Sphinx vs. Splice Machine vs. SurrealDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch and based on Apache Lucene

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

A fully ACID transactional, developer-friendly, multi-model DBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Search engine

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph 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

Vector DBMS

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

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	16.03
Rank	#37	Overall
	#4	Search engines

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.54
Rank	#252	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Score	1.02
Rank	#190	Overall
	#33	Document stores
	#18	Graph DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

github.com/opensearch-project
opensearch.org

sphinxsearch.com

splicemachine.com

surrealdb.com

Technical documentation

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

opensearch.org/docs/latest

sphinxsearch.com/docs

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

surrealdb.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Amazon Web Services

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Splice Machine

SurrealDB Ltd

Initial release

2019

2021

2001

2014

2022

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

2.5.0, January 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

3.1, March 2021

v1.5.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

Open Source

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.

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Java

Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

yes

schema-free

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

GraphQL
RESTful HTTP API
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Elasticsearch client

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

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

Deno
Go
JavaScript (Node.js)
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

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

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

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

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar 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

none

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

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 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

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

OpenSearch is a highly scalable and extensible open-source software suite for search,...
» more

Competitive advantages

Distributed as fully open source under Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2), OpenSearch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

The OpenSearch platform is used across a broad range of search , analytics, and observability...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

The OpenSearch Project offers open source software licensed under Apache License...
» more

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