DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. Stardog vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Sphinx vs. Stardog vs. VoltDB

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

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

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

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

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

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	2.07
Rank	#122	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.stardog.com

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Stardog-Union

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2019

2014

2001

2010

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

3.5.1, February 2023

7.3.0, May 2020

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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

C++

Java

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Java

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

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.

yes

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

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

Access rights for users and roles

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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