DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB vs. SAP Advantage Database Server

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Graph Engine vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. RocksDB 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

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Embeddable persistent key-value store optimized for fast storage (flash and RAM)

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

column oriented

Key-value store

Relational DBMS

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	98.94
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.56
Rank	#241	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#34	Key-value stores

Score	3.28
Rank	#83	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#97	Overall
	#16	Key-value stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.graphengine.io

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

rocksdb.org

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

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

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

github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Facebook, Inc.

Sybase, SAP

Initial release

2008

2010

2019

2013

1993

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

cloud service with continuous releases

9.4.0, June 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

MIT License

commercial

Open Source

BSD

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

.NET and C

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

.NET

hosted

Linux

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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

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

RESTful HTTP API

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

C++ API
Java 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

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

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

C
C++
Go
Java
Perl
Python
Ruby

Delphi
Perl
PHP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

Triggers

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

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

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

yes

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

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
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

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

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...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Market metrics

Apache 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...
» more

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