DBMS > Amazon Neptune vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon Neptune vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. MySQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud

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.

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Widely used open source RDBMS

Primary database model

column oriented

Key/Value like access via memcached API

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

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.29
Rank	#113	Overall
	#9	Graph DBMS
	#5	RDF stores

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1061.34
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/neptune

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.mysql.com

Technical documentation

aws.amazon.com/neptune/developer-resources

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

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

dev.mysql.com/doc

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

2017

2008

2012

2019

1995

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

8.4.0, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

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

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

OpenCypher
RDF 1.1 / SPARQL 1.1
TinkerPop Gremlin

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Supported programming languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-availability zones high availability, asynchronous replication for up to 15 read replicas within a single region. Global database clusters consists of a primary write DB cluster in one region, and up to five secondary read DB clusters in different regions. Each secondary region can have up to 16 reader instances.

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.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with encyption-at-rest

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

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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