DBMS > Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Google BigQuery vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MaxCompute (previously known as ODPS) is a general purpose, fully managed, multi-tenancy data processing platform for large-scale data warehousing

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

a graph-processing framework is available with the graphs being stored in tables

Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

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

Score	0.77
Rank	#214	Overall
	#98	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/maxcompute

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

cloud.google.com/bigquery

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/maxcompute

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

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

Developer

Alibaba

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Google

Microsoft

Initial release

2016

2008

2012

2010

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

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.

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

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

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

Fluentd
Flume
MaxCompute Console

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

Java

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Java

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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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