DBMS > BaseX vs. Cassandra vs. LeanXcale vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison BaseX vs. Cassandra vs. LeanXcale vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. TimesTen

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A highly scalable full ACID SQL database with fast NoSQL data ingestion and GIS capabilities

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Native XML DBMS

Wide column store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Relational DBMS

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	1.84
Rank	#135	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.36
Rank	#280	Overall
	#40	Key-value stores
	#129	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1.36
Rank	#161	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Website

basex.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.leanxcale.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

docs.basex.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

BaseX GmbH

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

LeanXcale

Microsoft

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2007

2008

2015

2019

1998

Current release

11.0, June 2024

4.1.3, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

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
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

XQuery supports types

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

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

yes

through Apache Derby

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC
proprietary key/value interface
Spark Connector

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

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
Java
Scala

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

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

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.

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

multiple readers, single writer

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

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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