DBMS > Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Blueflood vs. Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Blueflood vs. Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. Google Cloud Spanner

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Scalable TimeSeries DBMS based on Cassandra

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	0.76
Rank	#220	Overall
	#102	Relational DBMS

Score	0.13
Rank	#346	Overall
	#33	Time Series DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#100	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/hybriddb-postgresql

blueflood.io

cassandra.apache.org

clickhouse.com

cloud.google.com/spanner

Technical documentation

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

github.com/rax-maas/blueflood/wiki

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

clickhouse.com/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

Developer

Alibaba / Pivotal Software Inc. / PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Rackspace

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Clickhouse Inc.

Google

Initial release

2016

2013

2008

2016

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

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

ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

predefined scheme

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST

Proprietary protocol

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

key based and custom

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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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