DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Oracle NoSQL vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A multi-model, scalable, distributed NoSQL database, designed to provide highly reliable, flexible, and available data management across a configurable set of storage nodes

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

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Document store
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Search engine

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

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

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	2.95
Rank	#100	Overall
	#17	Document stores
	#17	Key-value stores
	#50	Relational 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.oracle.com/database/nosql/technologies/nosql

www.snowflake.com

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.oracle.com/en/database/other-databases/nosql-database/index.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Microsoft

Oracle

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2019

2011

2014

2001

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

23.3, December 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Proprietary for Enterprise Edition (Oracle Database EE license has Oracle NoSQL database EE covered: details)

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
Solaris SPARC/x86

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

Support Fixed schema and Schema-less deployment with the ability to interoperate between them.

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

optional

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

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

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

C
C#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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.

Electable source-replica replication per shard. Support distributed global deployment with Multi-region table feature

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

configurable

ACID within a storage node (=shard)

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

off heap cache

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Access rights for users and roles

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

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