DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Microsoft SQL Server

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Microsoft SQL Server

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

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	108.05
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	774.89
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

1989

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted free version is available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Windows

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
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

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.

yes

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

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Recent citations in the news

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

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 to buy Cassandra specialist DataStax
25 February 2025, The Stack

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