DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Our visitors often compare Apache Cassandra and Microsoft Azure SQL Database with PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

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	108.21
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	75.37
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

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

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2010

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

News

Introduction to Webhooks in Langflow: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
24 April 2025

Building Graph-Based RAG Applications Just Got Easier
23 April 2025

Scale AI Agent Speed and Savings with Langflow and NVIDIA NeMo Microservices
23 April 2025

5 Days of Accuracy: A Recipe for AI That Gets It Right
22 April 2025

DataStax and Google Cloud: Partners in AI, Data, and Innovation
17 April 2025

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.

Related products and services

We invite representatives of vendors of related products to contact us for presenting information about their offerings here.

More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2020
4 January 2021, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

Cloud-based DBMS's popularity grows at high rates
12 December 2019, Paul Andlinger

The popularity of cloud-based DBMSs has increased tenfold in four years
7 February 2017, Matthias Gelbmann

show all

Recent citations in the news

Best practices for running Apache Cassandra with Amazon EBS
8 November 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

New Apache Cassandra 5.0 gives open source NoSQL database a scalability and performance boost
6 September 2024, VentureBeat

Apache Cassandra survey highlights growing adoption for AI workloads
11 November 2024, Blocks and Files

Apache Cassandra introduces version 5.0 of open-source NoSQL database
9 September 2024, techzine.eu

IBM plans to buy open source Cassandra wrangler DataStax
25 February 2025, theregister.com

provided by Google News

Continuous Replication to Amazon RDS for SQL Server from Azure SQL
10 January 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The year ahead for SQL Server: Ground to cloud to fabric
15 January 2025, Microsoft

Native Vector Support in Azure SQL Database in Public Preview
16 November 2024, infoq.com

Announcing Microsoft SQL Server 2025: Enterprise AI-ready database from ground to cloud
19 November 2024, Microsoft

Modernize your database with the consolidation and retirement of Azure Database Migration tools
12 September 2024, Microsoft

provided by Google News

Share this page