DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Realm vs. Snowflake vs. VelocityDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Realm vs. Snowflake vs. VelocityDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

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

A .NET Object Database that can be embedded/distributed and extended to a graph data model (VelocityGraph)

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Document store

Relational DBMS

Graph DBMS
Object oriented 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

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

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	7.41
Rank	#52	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#354	Overall
	#37	Graph DBMS
	#15	Object oriented DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

realm.io

www.snowflake.com

velocitydb.com

Technical documentation

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

realm.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

velocitydb.com/UserGuide

Developer

Microsoft

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

Snowflake Computing Inc.

VelocityDB Inc

Initial release

2019

2014

2011

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

7.x

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

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

Server operating systems

hosted

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

hosted

Any that supports .NET

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.Net

Supported programming languages

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Change Listeners

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

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.

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

yes

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

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

Based on Windows Authentication

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