DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Cassandra vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Cassandra vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A cloud-native relational database compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. Designed for business critical applications.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Distributed Event Store optimized for Internet of Things use cases

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Event Store
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	0.59
Rank	#241	Overall
	#110	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.19
Rank	#323	Overall
	#2	Event Stores
	#28	Time Series DBMS

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

cassandra.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2-event-store

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/polardb/product-overview

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-event-store

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

Developer

Alibaba

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2017

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.0

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free developer edition 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.

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

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux, macOS, Windows for the developer addition

hosted

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

yes

through the embedded Spark runtime

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
DB2 Connect
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

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

Active-active shard replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

No - written data is immutable

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes - Synchronous writes to local disk combined with replication and asynchronous writes in parquet format to permanent shared storage

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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

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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

Specification and pricing. You can use either of the following billing methods to...
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Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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