DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RavenDB vs. Snowflake vs. Teradata Aster vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RavenDB vs. Snowflake vs. Teradata Aster vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Teradata Aster has been integrated into other Teradata systems and therefore will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

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

Platform for big data analytics on multistructured data sources and types

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

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	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

ravendb.net

www.snowflake.com

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

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

ravendb.net/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Microsoft

Hibernating Rhinos

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Teradata

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2019

2010

2014

2005

2010

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

5.4, July 2022

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

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
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

defined schema within the relational store; partial schema or schema free in the Aster File Store

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

in Aster File Store

Secondary indexes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language (RQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON 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

C
C#
C++
Java
Python
R

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

user defined functions

R packages

Java

Triggers

yes

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

yes

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

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

Dimension tables are replicated across all nodes in the cluster. The number of replicas for the file store can be configured.

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

SQL Map-Reduce Framework

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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