DBMS > Cassandra vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Splice Machine vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Splice Machine vs. TiDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

Open-Source SQL RDBMS for Operational and Analytical use cases with native Machine Learning, powered by Hadoop and Spark

TiDB is an open source distributed SQL database that supports Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. It is MySQL compatible and features horizontal scalability, strong consistency, and high availability.

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

Document store

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	91.04
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	76.78
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	0.54
Rank	#252	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#74	Overall
	#40	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

splicemachine.com

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

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

splicemachine.com/how-it-works

docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Microsoft

Splice Machine

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2010

2014

2016

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

V12

3.1, March 2021

8.1.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

Open Source

AGPL 3.0, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

TiDB Cloud: Fully-managed TiDB Service. Bring everything great about TiDB to the cloud.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Java

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
Native Spark Datasource
ODBC

GORM
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
SQLAlchemy

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
R
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Transact SQL

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

Shared Nothhing Auto-Sharding, Columnar Partitioning

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Yes, via Full Spark Integration

yes

with TiSpark Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

full support since version 6.6

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

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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MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
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- HORIZONTAL SCALING : TiDB grants total transparency into your data workloads without...
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Typical application scenarios

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

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
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TiDB is ideal for transactional applications that require extreme scalability and...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
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Block, Pinterest, Catalyst, Bolt, Flipkart, Capcom, Shopee (E-commerce), JD Cloud...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
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34K+ GitHub stars 5K+ members in TiDB Community Slack 1K+ community contributors...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
» more

TiDB Community : Free open source software (Apache 2.0) TiDB Self-Hosted : Enterprise...
» more

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