DBMS > Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Cassandra vs. mSQL vs. TimesTen vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud PolarDB vs. Cassandra vs. mSQL vs. TimesTen vs. XTDB

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

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	0.66
Rank	#235	Overall
	#108	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.27
Rank	#169	Overall
	#76	Relational DBMS

Score	1.36
Rank	#161	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/polardb

cassandra.apache.org

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

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

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Alibaba

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Hughes Technologies

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2008

1994

1998

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

4.4, October 2021

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free licenses can be provided

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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)

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

Java
Python

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/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"

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

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

none

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Licensing and pricing models

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