DBMS > Cassandra vs. Ehcache vs. GraphDB vs. Hazelcast vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Ehcache vs. GraphDB vs. Hazelcast 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 widely adopted Java cache with tiered storage options

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Primary database model

column oriented

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

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	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	4.89
Rank	#67	Overall
	#8	Key-value stores

Score	3.32
Rank	#91	Overall
	#6	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Website

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.ehcache.org/documentation

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

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

Social network pages

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Terracotta Inc, owned by Software AG

Ontotext

Hazelcast

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2009

2000

2008

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.10.0, March 2022

10.4, October 2023

5.3.6, November 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses 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

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

schema-free

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

SQL-like query language

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

JCache

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
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

Java

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

Events

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

by using Terracotta Server

none

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

by using Terracotta Server

Multi-source replication

yes

Replicated Map

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

Tunable Consistency (Strong, Eventual, Weak)

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

supports JTA and can work as an XA resource

ACID

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using a tiered cache-storage approach

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

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

Role-based access control

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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Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
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News

Understanding the Graph Center of Excellence
17 May 2024

Migrating From LPG to RDF Graph Model
8 May 2024

Case study: Policy Enforcement Automation With Semantics
2 May 2024

Okay, RAG… We Have a Problem
26 April 2024

Scaling Understanding with the Help of Feedback Loops, Knowledge Graphs and NLP
19 April 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.