DBMS > Amazon Redshift vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NSDb vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison Amazon Redshift vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. NSDb vs. Postgres-XL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Large scale data warehouse service for use with business intelligence tools

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	17.94
Rank	#34	Overall
	#21	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/redshift

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

nsdb.io

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

nsdb.io/Architecture

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Amazon (based on PostgreSQL)

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Initial release

2012

2008

2014

2017

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Mozilla public 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

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes: int, bigint, decimal, string

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

All properties auto-indexed by default

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

does not fully support an SQL-standard

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

SQL-like query language

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Java
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in Python

JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

informational only, not enforced by the system

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

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Using Apache Lucene

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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