DBMS > Apache Phoenix vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Apache Phoenix vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

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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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

column oriented

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

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

Score	2.06
Rank	#123	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	3.95
Rank	#80	Overall
	#42	Relational DBMS

Website

phoenix.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

phoenix.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2014

2008

2019

1992

Current release

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

4.1.3, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

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

Implementation language

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

yes

late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities

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

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

Proprietary protocol

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

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

ADO.NET
HTTP API
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

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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

yes

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

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

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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

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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

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