DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Apache Cassandra vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ObjectBox

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Apache Cassandra vs. LevelDB vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. ObjectBox

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

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Lightweight, fast on-device database for IoT, Mobile and Embedded devices, persisting and synchronising objects and vectors

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Object oriented DBMS
Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	0.82
Rank	#205	Overall
	#97	Relational DBMS

Score	98.94
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.33
Rank	#111	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Score	24.97
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	1.08
Rank	#179	Overall
	#6	Object oriented DBMS
	#9	Vector DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/google/leveldb

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/objectbox
objectbox.io

Technical documentation

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

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

docs.objectbox.io

Developer

Alibaba

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

Microsoft

ObjectBox Limited

Initial release

2008

2011

2014

2017

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

1.23, February 2021

4.0 (May 2024)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

BSD

commercial

Bindings are released under Apache 2.0

Apache License 2.0

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++

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Android
Any POSIX system
Docker
iOS
Linux
macOS
QNX
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes, plus "flex" map-like 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

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C
C++
Dart (Flutter)
Go
Java
Kotlin
Python
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

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

none

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

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Data sync between devices allowing occasional connected databases to work completely offline

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

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 can be defined down to the item level

yes

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

Apache 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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