DBMS > Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. QuestDB vs. Rockset

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Milvus vs. QuestDB vs. Rockset

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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 open source SQL database for time series data

A scalable, reliable search and analytics service in the cloud, built on RocksDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	20.56
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	2.31
Rank	#113	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.79
Rank	#211	Overall
	#35	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

milvus.io

questdb.io

rockset.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

questdb.io/docs

docs.rockset.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

QuestDB Technology Inc

Rockset

Initial release

2008

2016

2019

2014

2019

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 2.0

commercial

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

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

dynamic typing

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.

ingestion from XML files supported

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

all fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL with time-series extensions

Read-only SQL queries, including JOINs

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
PHP

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

Sharding

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

Automatic sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

ACID for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Access rights for users and organizations can be defined via Rockset console

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

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
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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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High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
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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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Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

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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Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
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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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Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.