DBMS > Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs. Cassandra vs. SAP HANA vs. ScyllaDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs. Cassandra vs. SAP HANA vs. ScyllaDB vs. Snowflake

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

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

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

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

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	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	4.75
Rank	#68	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/maxcompute

cassandra.apache.org

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.scylladb.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/maxcompute

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

help.sap.com/hana

docs.scylladb.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Alibaba

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

SAP

ScyllaDB

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2016

2008

2010

2015

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based 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.

Scylla Cloud: Create real-time applications that run at global scale with Scylla Cloud, the industry’s most powerful NoSQL DBaaS

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

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

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

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

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

Fluentd
Flume
MaxCompute Console

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC

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

Java

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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 Java

SQLScript, R

yes, Lua

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Sharding

yes

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

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

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

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

Access rights for users and roles

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes

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

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

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

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.