DBMS > Cassandra vs. Cloudflare Workers KV vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Cloudflare Workers KV vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A global, low-latency, key-value store for applications on Cloudflare with exceptionally high read volumes and low-latency.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

Wide column store

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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	0.39
Rank	#274	Overall
	#39	Key-value stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/workers-kv

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.kinetica.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

developers.cloudflare.com/kv/api

docs.heavy.ai

docs.kinetica.com

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Cloudflare

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Kinetica

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2018

2016

2012

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.10, January 2022

7.1, August 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition 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

C++ and CUDA

C, C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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 SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

HTTP REST
Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

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

C
C++
Dart
JavaScript
Kotlin
Python
Rust
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

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

Round robin

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

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 and roles on table level

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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