DBMS > Cassandra vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Quasardb vs. SWC-DB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Heroic vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Quasardb vs. SWC-DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

A high performance, scalable Wide Column DBMS

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

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.38
Rank	#77	Overall
	#41	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.01
Rank	#376	Overall
	#13	Wide column stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

quasar.ai

github.com/kashirin-alex/swc-db
www.swcdb.org

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

spotify.github.io/heroic

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

doc.quasar.ai/master

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Spotify

Microsoft

quasardb

Alex Kashirin

Initial release

2008

2014

2019

2009

2020

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

3.14.1, January 2024

0.5, April 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

Open Source

GPL V3

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

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

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

integer and binary

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

via Elasticsearch

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

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

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

HTTP API

Proprietary protocol
Thrift

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

C++

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

Triggers

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

consistent hashing

Sharding

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.

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Spark connector (open source): github.com/Azure/azure-kusto-spark

with Hadoop integration

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

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

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

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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