DBMS > Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Qdrant vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Data Explorer vs. Qdrant vs. SAP Advantage Database Server vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

SAP Advantage Database Server seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Fully managed big data interactive analytics platform

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

Low-cost RDBMS with access to ISAM and FoxPro data structures

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

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

Relational DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	3.80
Rank	#81	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	1.28
Rank	#167	Overall
	#7	Vector DBMS

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/data-explorer

github.com/qdrant/qdrant
qdrant.tech

www.sap.com/products/advantage-database-server.html

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

qdrant.tech/documentation

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Qdrant

Sybase, SAP

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2019

2021

1993

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

cloud service with continuous releases

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

commercial

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.

Implementation language

Java

Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Docker
Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Fixed schema with schema-less datatypes (dynamic)

schema-free

yes

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

Numbers, Strings, Geo, Boolean

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

all fields are automatically indexed

yes

Keywords, numberic ranges, geo, full-text

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Kusto Query Language (KQL), SQL subset

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

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

gRPC
OpenAPI 3.0
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

OpenAPI 3.0

.NET Client API
ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
OLE DB

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

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
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

Delphi
Perl
PHP

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Yes, possible languages: KQL, Python, R

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

see docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/management/updatepolicy

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

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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.

Collection-level replication

Multi-source replication

CONFLICT Trigger to resolve replication conflicts
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

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

Eventual Consistency, tunable consistency

Immediate 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

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

caching of (temporary) tables can be configured

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Azure Active Directory Authentication

Key-based authentication

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...
» more

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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