DBMS > Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Teradata vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Snowflake vs. Teradata vs. TerminusDB

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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

A hybrid cloud data analytics software platform (Teradata Vantage)

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

Graph 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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	133.72
Rank	#7	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	41.47
Rank	#22	Overall
	#15	Relational DBMS

Score	0.19
Rank	#311	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.snowflake.com

www.teradata.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.teradata.com

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Microsoft

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Teradata

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2019

2014

1984

2018

Current release

cloud service with continuous releases

Teradata Vantage 1.0 MU2, January 2019

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

GPL V3

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

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

hosted
Linux

Linux

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

Join-index to prejoin tables, aggregate index, sparse index, hash index

SQL

Support of SQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

SQL 2016 + extensions

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API
HTTP REST
JDBC
JMS Adapter
ODBC
OLE DB

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

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

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Cobol
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
Perl
PL/1
Python
R
Ruby

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

user defined functions

yes

UDFs, stored procedures, table functions in parallel

yes

Triggers

yes

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

similar concept for controling cloud resources

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

Sharding

Hashing

Graph Partitioning

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Journaling Streams

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 journaling

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

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