Azure Cosmos DB vs. Amazon Redshift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Cosmos DB
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's Big Data analysis platform. It is a NoSQL database service and is a replacement for the earlier DocumentDB NoSQL database.N/A
Amazon Redshift
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
Pricing
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Redshift Managed Storage
$0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum
$5.00
per terabyte of data scanned
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
Considered Both Products
Azure Cosmos DB
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
We evaluated Mongo DB and Amazon Redshift. In the end, we decided to have both Redshift and Cosmos but for different app stacks. For apps hosted on Azure, Cosmos plays a very important role. Also from a support standpoint, Microsoft offers very good service and an equally good …
Chose Azure Cosmos DB
Our development and administration teams are just more familiar with the Microsoft Stack, and there was very little additional knowledge required to put this into production.
Amazon Redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is one of the fastest service offerings available in the market now. Plus you get an advantage of using a cutting edge compute service offering from AWS. Other technologies are fast but not as good as Amazon Redshift, I would say. Our business is interested in …
Features
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Azure Cosmos DB
9.9
7 Ratings
11% above category average
Amazon Redshift
-
Ratings
Performance10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Concurrency10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Security10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Data model flexibility9.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility10.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
Small Businesses
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Cloudant
IBM Cloudant
Score 7.4 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(7 ratings)
9.0
(38 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.6
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(2 ratings)
9.0
(10 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(2 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure Cosmos DBAmazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Like any NoSQL database, whether it's MongoDB or not, it's best suited for unstructured data. It's also well suited for storing raw data before processing it and performing any type of ETL on the data.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Scalable Instantly and automatically serverless database for any large scale business.
  • Quick access and response to data queries due to high speed in reading and writing data
  • Create a powerful digital experience for your customers with real-time offers and agile access to DB with super-fast analysis and comparison for best recommendation
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
  • [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Expensive, so be careful of the use case.
  • We had a thought time migrating from traditional DBs to Cosmos. Azure should provide a seamless platform for the migration of data from on-premises to cloud.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
  • Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
  • Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
It's efficient, easy to scale, and works. We do have to do a bit of administration, but less now than when we started with this a couple of years ago. Microsoft continues to improve its self-management capability.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
It has very good compatibility and adaptability with other APIs and developers can safely create new apps because it is compatible with various tools and can be easily managed and run under the cloud, and in terms of security, it is one of the best of its kind, which is very powerful and excellent.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
Microsoft is the best when it comes to after-sales support. They have a well-structured training and knowledge base portal that anyone can use. They are usually quick to respond to cases and are on point for on-call support. I have no complaints from a support standpoint. Pretty happy with the support.
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Amazon AWS
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Cosmos DB is unique in the industry as a true multi-model, cloud-native database engine that comes with solutions for geo-redundancy, multi-master writes, (globally!) low latency, and cost-effective hosting built in. I've yet to see anything else that even comes close to the power that Cosmos DB packs into its solution. The simplicity and tooling support are nice bonus features as well.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • It's made managing raw data much easier
  • It provides a way to maintain raw data at a low cost
  • It's easy to massage the data
Read full review
Amazon AWS
  • Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
  • Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
  • Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
Read full review
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