DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RavenDB vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RavenDB vs. Snowflake vs. Spark SQL vs. Transbase

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

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

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

A resource-optimized, high-performance, universally applicable RDBMS

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Document store

Relational 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

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#341	Overall
	#150	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

ravendb.net

www.snowflake.com

spark.apache.org/sql

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase.html

Technical documentation

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

ravendb.net/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

www.transaction.de/en/products/transbase/features.html

Developer

Microsoft

Hibernating Rhinos

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Apache Software Foundation

Transaction Software GmbH

Initial release

2019

2010

2014

1987

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

5.4, July 2022

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

Transbase 8.3, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free development license

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

Scala

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS
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

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

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Python
R
Scala

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
Objective-C
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

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

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

yes

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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

yes

none

Source-replica replication

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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

ACID

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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