DBMS > Cassandra vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. Qdrant

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. IBM Db2 warehouse vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. Qdrant

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Cloud-based data warehousing service

Elastic, large scale data warehouse service leveraging the broad eco-system of SQL Server

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

A high-performance vector database with neural network or semantic-based matching

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.30
Rank	#164	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	1.16
Rank	#175	Overall
	#6	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2/warehouse

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

milvus.io

github.com/qdrant/qdrant
qdrant.tech

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

qdrant.tech/documentation

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM

Microsoft

Qdrant

Initial release

2008

2014

2016

2019

2021

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C++

C++, Go

Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Docker
Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

Numbers, Strings, Geo, Boolean

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

Keywords, numberic ranges, geo, full-text

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

.NET Client API
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

gRPC
OpenAPI 3.0
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

OpenAPI 3.0

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

C#
Java
PHP

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PL/SQL, SQL PL

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Collection-level replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency, tunable consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Key-based 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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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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