DBMS > Cassandra vs. Dgraph vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2 vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Dgraph vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. IBM Db2 vs. Milvus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Distributed and scalable native Graph DBMS

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

Common in IBM host environments, 2 different versions for host and Windows/Linux

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Graph DBMS

Relational DBMS

Since Version 10.5 support for JSON/BSON documents compatible with MongoDB

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
RDF store

in Db2 LUW (Linux, Unix, Windows)
Spatial DBMS

with Db2 Spatial Extender

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.45
Rank	#156	Overall
	#15	Graph DBMS

Score	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	128.46
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

dgraph.io

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.ibm.com/products/db2

milvus.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

dgraph.io/docs

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Dgraph Labs, Inc.

Google

IBM

Initial release

2008

2016

2017

1983

host version

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

12.1, October 2016

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free version is available

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++, Go

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

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

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

GraphQL query language
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HTTP API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
JSON style queries

MongoDB compatible
ODBC
XQuery

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

yes

Sharding

only with Windows/Unix/Linux Version

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Synchronous replication via Raft

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes

with separate tools (MQ, InfoSphere)

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on 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

Strict serializable isolation

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

Planned for future releases

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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