DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Postgres-XL vs. PouchDB vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Postgres-XL vs. PouchDB vs. RethinkDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

JavaScript DBMS with an API inspired by CouchDB

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

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

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
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.53
Rank	#254	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	2.34
Rank	#112	Overall
	#21	Document stores

Score	2.66
Rank	#107	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

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

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

pouchdb.com/guides

rethinkdb.com/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Apache Software Foundation

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2019

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2012

2009

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

10 R1, October 2018

7.1.1, June 2019

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

Apache Version 2

commercial

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

JavaScript

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

schema-free

yes

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

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, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

yes

Secondary indexes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

HTTP REST

only for PouchDB Server
JavaScript API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

JavaScript

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

with a proxy-based framework, named couchdb-lounge

Sharding

range based

yes

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

also with CouchDB databases
Source-replica replication

also with CouchDB databases

Source-replica replication

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

MVCC

Atomic single-document operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, WebSQL or LevelDB as backend

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

users and table-level permissions

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

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