DBMS > Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. Milvus

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

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

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	103.86
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	29.85
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	78.40
Rank	#15	Overall
	#10	Relational DBMS

Score	1.81
Rank	#144	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

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

milvus.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

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

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2014

2010

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

V12

2.3.4, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

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

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

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

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

JavaScript

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

yes, with always 3 replicas available

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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...
» more

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,...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

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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