DBMS > Cassandra vs. Datomic vs. GridGain vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. NSDb

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Datomic vs. GridGain vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. NSDb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

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

Scalable, High-performance Time Series DBMS designed for Real-time Analytics on top of Kubernetes

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	1.55
Rank	#150	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#70	Relational DBMS

Score	19.93
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	0.08
Rank	#369	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.datomic.com

www.gridgain.com

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

nsdb.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.datomic.com

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

nsdb.io/Architecture

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Cognitect

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2012

2007

2016

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.0.7075, December 2023

GridGain 8.5.1

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Java, Clojure

Java, C++, .Net

C++

Java, Scala

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes: int, bigint, decimal, 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

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP API

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC
HTTP REST
WebSocket

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Clojure
Java

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
PHP

Java
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

By using transaction functions

yes (cache interceptors and events)

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

yes (replicated cache)

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

Using Apache Lucene

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Security Hooks for custom implementations

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

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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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