DBMS > Cassandra vs. eXtremeDB vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. eXtremeDB vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Natively in-memory DBMS with options for persistency, high-availability and clustering

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

column oriented

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

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.74
Rank	#223	Overall
	#103	Relational DBMS
	#18	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.mcobject.com

github.com/spotify/heroic

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.mcobject.com/docs/extremedb.htm

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

McObject

Spotify

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2001

2014

2019

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.2, 2021

cloud service with continuous releases

V12

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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 and C++

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

hosted

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

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.

support of XML interfaces available

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with the option: eXtremeSQL

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

.NET Client API
JDBC
JNI
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
Lua
Python
Scala

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

by defining events

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

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

Active Replication Fabric™ for IoT
Multi-source replication

by means of eXtremeDB Cluster option
Source-replica replication

by means of eXtremeDB High Availability option

yes

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

yes, with always 3 replicas available

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

Immediate 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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic (MVCC) and pessimistic (locking) strategies available

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

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...
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eXtremeDB is an in-memory and/or persistent database system that offers an ultra-small...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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eXtremeDB databases can be modeled relationally or as objects and can utilize SQL...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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IoT application across all markets: Industrial Control, Netcom, Telecom, Defense,...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Schneider Electronics, F5 Networks, TNS, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, GoPro, ViaSat,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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With hundreds of customers and over 30 million devices/applications using the product...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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For server use cases, there is a simple per-server license irrespective of the number...
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