DBMS > Apache Phoenix vs. Cassandra vs. H2 vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

System Properties Comparison Apache Phoenix vs. Cassandra vs. H2 vs. IBM Db2 vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A scale-out RDBMS with evolutionary schema built on Apache HBase

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	1.97
Rank	#126	Overall
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Website

phoenix.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.h2database.com

www.ibm.com/products/db2

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

Technical documentation

phoenix.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Thomas Mueller

IBM

Microsoft

Initial release

2014

2008

2005

1983

host version

2010

Current release

5.0-HBase2, July 2018 and 4.15-HBase1, December 2019

4.1.3, July 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

12.1, October 2016

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

free version is available

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.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

hosted

Data scheme

yes

late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities

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

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)

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

yes, with always 3 replicas available

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

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 Control Lists (using HBase ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC, multi-tenancy

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

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Licensing and pricing models

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