DBMS > Cassandra vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB vs. TiDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. MariaDB vs. Microsoft SQL Server vs. RavenDB 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.

Microsofts flagship relational DBMS

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

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

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

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	824.29
Rank	#3	Overall
	#3	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	4.66
Rank	#70	Overall
	#38	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server

ravendb.net

pingcap.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

learn.microsoft.com/en-US/sql/sql-server

ravendb.net/docs

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

Hibernating Rhinos

PingCAP, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

1989

2010

2016

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

11.3.2, February 2024

SQL Server 2022, November 2022

5.4, July 2022

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

restricted free version is available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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.

SQLServer Flex @ STACKIT offers a managed version of SQL Server with adjustable CPU, RAM, storage amount and speed, in enterprise grade to perfectly match all application requirements. All services are 100% GDPR-compliant.

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

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C++

Go, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

schema-free

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

SQL-like query language (RQL)

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
OLE DB
Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

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

C#
C++
Delphi
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Visual Basic

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

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, .NET languages, R, Python and (with SQL Server 2019) Java

yes

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

tables can be distributed across several files (horizontal partitioning); sharding through federation

Sharding

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, but depending on the SQL-Server Edition

Multi-source 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

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

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

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

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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...
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TiDB is an advanced open-source, distributed SQL database for modern application...
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Competitive advantages

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