DBMS > Cassandra vs. GBase vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. GBase vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. SAP Advantage Database Server

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

Widely used RDBMS in China, including analytical, transactional, distributed transactional, and cloud-native data warehousing.

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

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	1.05
Rank	#186	Overall
	#86	Relational DBMS

Score	4.36
Rank	#72	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.gbase.cn

cloud.google.com/datastore

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

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

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

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

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

General Data Technology Co., Ltd.

Google

Microsoft

Sybase, SAP

Initial release

2008

2004

2008

2019

1993

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

GBase 8a, GBase 8s, GBase 8c

cloud service with continuous releases

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

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, Java, Python

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

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

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Standard with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language (GQL)

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
C API
JDBC
ODBC

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Delphi
Perl
PHP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

using Google App Engine

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Triggers

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

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

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning (by range, list and hash) and vertical partitioning

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Multi-source replication using Paxos

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

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

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.

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes

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

Azure Active Directory Authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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