DBMS > Apache Pinot vs. Cassandra vs. GBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Apache Pinot vs. Cassandra vs. GBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Realtime distributed OLAP datastore, designed to answer OLAP queries with low latency

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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	0.38
Rank	#275	Overall
	#126	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.05
Rank	#186	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#19	Document stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

pinot.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.gbase.cn

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

docs.pinot.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

2015

2008

2004

2010

2019

Current release

1.0.0, September 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

cloud service with continuous releases

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

C, Java, Python

Erlang

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java JDK11 or higher

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

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

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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

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

Standard with numerous extensions

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Supported programming languages

Go
Java
Python

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
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

atomic operations within a document possible

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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

yes

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Azure Active Directory Authentication

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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