DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake

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Our visitors often compare Microsoft Azure Data Explorer and Snowflake with Databricks, OpenSearch and Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

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

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

Score	2.94
Rank	#85	Overall
	#46	Relational DBMS

Score	168.09
Rank	#6	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2019

2014

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or 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.

Server operating systems

hosted

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

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

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

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.

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.

User concepts

Access control

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Snowflake is the Database Management System of the Year 2024
16 January 2025, Tom Russell

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2022, defending the title from last year
3 January 2023, Matthias Gelbmann, Paul Andlinger

Snowflake is the DBMS of the Year 2021
3 January 2022, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

show all

Recent citations in the news

Universal Destinations & Experiences proactively improves guest satisfaction with Azure Data Explorer
14 February 2025, Microsoft

Log and Telemetry Analytics Performance Benchmark
16 August 2022, Gigaom

Azure Data Explorer: Log and telemetry analytics benchmark
16 August 2022, Microsoft Azure

Azure Data Explorer Supports Native Ingestion from Amazon S3
7 September 2022, infoq.com

Microsoft announces general availability of Azure Data Explorer and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
7 February 2019, VentureBeat

provided by Google News

EDF Builds an Intelligent Customer Engine on the Snowflake Data Cloud
11 April 2025, Snowflake

Snowflake for Applications & Collaboration | AI Data Cloud
17 February 2025, Snowflake

Snowflake for Data Lakes
17 February 2025, Snowflake

Snowflake Unistore
10 April 2025, Snowflake

provided by Google News

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