DBMS > Cassandra vs. Citus vs. EXASOL vs. InterSystems Caché vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Citus vs. EXASOL vs. InterSystems Caché vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Caché is a deprecated database engine which is substituted with InterSystems IRIS. It therefore is removed from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

A multi-model DBMS and application server

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.15
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

www.exasol.com

www.intersystems.com/products/cache

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.citusdata.com

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.intersystems.com

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Exasol

InterSystems

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2010

2000

1997

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.1, December 2018

2018.1.4, May 2020

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also 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

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

AIX
HP Open VMS
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

depending on used data model

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

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 SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Java
Lua
Python
R

C#
C++
Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

user defined functions

yes

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

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

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

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

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

Hadoop integration

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

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

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 rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles

Azure Active Directory Authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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