DBMS > Cassandra vs. CockroachDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CockroachDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. Milvus vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	6.15
Rank	#55	Overall
	#33	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.cockroachlabs.com

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

milvus.io

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Cockroach Labs

Microsoft

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2008

2015

1989

2019

2016

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

23.1.1, May 2023

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

commercial

restricted free version is available

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

restricted open source version available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C++

C++, Go

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

schema-free

dynamic schema

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

RESTful HTTP API

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication using RAFT

yes, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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