DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon Redshift vs. HEAVY.AI vs. ScyllaDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon Redshift vs. HEAVY.AI vs. ScyllaDB vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

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

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

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

Score	0.46
Rank	#260	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#121	Relational DBMS

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	4.75
Rank	#68	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/redshift

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.scylladb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

docs.heavy.ai

docs.scylladb.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

ScyllaDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

2012

2016

2015

2014

Current release

5.10, January 2022

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

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.

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Implementation language

JavaScript

C++ and CUDA

C++

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

restricted

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

yes, Lua

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

Multi-source replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

yes

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

in-memory tables

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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