DBMS > Blazegraph vs. Cassandra vs. LMDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

System Properties Comparison Blazegraph vs. Cassandra vs. LMDB vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Amazon has acquired Blazegraph's domain and (probably) product. It is said that Amazon Neptune is based on Blazegraph.

Description

High-performance graph database supporting Semantic Web (RDF/SPARQL) and Graph Database (tinkerpop3, blueprints, vertex-centric) APIs with scale-out and High Availability.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A high performant, light-weight, embedded key-value database library

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

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	0.75
Rank	#219	Overall
	#19	Graph DBMS
	#8	RDF stores

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.99
Rank	#125	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Website

blazegraph.com

cassandra.apache.org

www.symas.com/symas-embedded-database-lmdb

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

Technical documentation

wiki.blazegraph.com

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.lmdb.tech/doc

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

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

Developer

Blazegraph

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Symas

Microsoft

Initial release

2006

2008

2011

2019

2016

Current release

2.1.5, March 2019

4.1.3, July 2023

0.9.32, January 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

extended commercial license available

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

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++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

RDF literal 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

SPARQL is used as query language

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL QUERY
SPARQL UPDATE
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

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

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Nim
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Swift
Tcl

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

C#
Java
PHP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

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

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

yes

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

yes

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in Graphs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

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

Security and Authentication via Web Application Container (Tomcat, Jetty)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Azure Active Directory Authentication

yes

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

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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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