DBMS > Cassandra vs. Dragonfly vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Dragonfly vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

SAP Advantage Database Server seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A drop-in Redis replacement that scales vertically to support millions of operations per second and terabyte sized workloads, all on a single instance

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Low-cost RDBMS with access to ISAM and FoxPro data structures

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

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	0.49
Rank	#261	Overall
	#38	Key-value stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly
www.dragonflydb.io

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

www.sap.com/products/advantage-database-server.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.dragonflydb.io/docs

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

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

DragonflyDB team and community contributors

Microsoft

Sybase, SAP

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2023

2019

1993

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.0, March 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

BSL 1.1

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++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

scheme-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bit arrays

yes

bool, datetime, dynamic, guid, int, long, real, string, timespan, double: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/query/scalar-data-types

yes

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Proprietary protocol

RESP - REdis Serialization Protocol

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

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Clojure
D
Dart
Elixir
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala
Swift
Tcl

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

Delphi
Perl
PHP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Lua

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

publish/subscribe channels provide some trigger functionality

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

yes

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate 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

Atomic execution of command blocks and scripts

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, strict serializability by the server

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

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Password-based authentication

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable 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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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