DBMS > Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Amazon CloudSearch vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Access vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Amazon CloudSearch vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Access vs. Sphinx

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An online MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) data warehousing service based on Greenplum

A hosted search engine service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Microsoft Access combines a backend RDBMS (JET / ACE Engine) with a GUI frontend for data manipulation and queries.

The Access frontend is often used for accessing other datasources (DBMS, Excel, etc.)

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	0.68
Rank	#231	Overall
	#105	Relational DBMS

Score	1.85
Rank	#137	Overall
	#12	Search engines

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	104.92
Rank	#11	Overall
	#8	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/hybriddb-postgresql

aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

cassandra.apache.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/access

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/analyticdb-for-postgresql/latest/product-introduction-overview

docs.aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/access

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Alibaba / Pivotal Software Inc. / PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2016

2012

2008

1992

2001

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1902 (16.0.11328.20222), March 2019

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Bundled with Microsoft Office

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Windows

Not a real database server, but making use of DLLs

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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

yes

all search fields are automatically indexed

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

but not compliant to any SQL standard

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

ADO.NET
DAO
ODBC
OLE DB

Proprietary protocol

Supported programming languages

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
VBA
Visual Basic.NET

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Triggers

yes

since Access 2010 using the ACE-engine

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

automatic partitioning across Amazon Search Instance as required

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

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

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

managed transparently by AWS

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

but no files for transaction logging

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

but no files for transaction logging

yes

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

In-memory capabilities

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

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

authentication via encrypted signatures

Access rights for users can be defined per object

a simple user-level security was built in till version Access 2003

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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