DBMS > Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. NCache vs. SpaceTime vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. NCache vs. SpaceTime vs. TimescaleDB

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

Open-Source and Enterprise in-memory Key-Value Store

SpaceTime is a spatio-temporal DBMS with a focus on performance.

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Search engine

Using distributed Lucene

Relational DBMS

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	0.94
Rank	#195	Overall
	#29	Key-value stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#7	Spatial DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/synapse-analytics

www.alachisoft.com/ncache

www.mireo.com/spacetime

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.microsoft.com/azure/synapse-analytics

www.alachisoft.com/resources/docs

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Alachisoft

Mireo

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2016

2005

2020

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.3.3, April 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Enterprise Edition available

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

C++

C#, .NET, .NET Core, Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

partial

Supported data types are Lists, Queues, Hashsets, Dictionary and Counter

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query syntax and LINQ for searching the cache. Cache Synchronization with SQL Server using SQL dependency.

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

IDistributedCache
JCache
LINQ
Proprietary native API

RESTful HTTP API

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

C#
Java
PHP

.Net
.Net Core
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

C#
C++
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Transact SQL

support for stored procedures with SQL-Server CLR

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

Notifications

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

yes

Fixed-grid hypercubes

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

yes, with selectable consistency level

Real-time block device replication (DRBD)

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Strong Eventual Consistency over WAN with Conflict Resolution using Bridge Topology

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-table-constraints

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

optimistic locking and pessimistic locking

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

yes

Authentication to access the cache via Active Directory/LDAP (possible roles: user, administrator)

yes

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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NCache has been the market leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005 . NCache...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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NCache is 100% .NET/ .NET Core based which fully supports ASP.NET Core Sessions ,...
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Typical application scenarios

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

NCache enables industries like retail, finance, banking IoT, travel, ecommerce, healthcare...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Bank of America, Citi, Natures Way, Charter Spectrum, Barclays, Henry Schein, GBM,...
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Market metrics

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

Market Leader in .NET Distributed Caching since 2005.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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NCache Open Source is free on an as-is basis without any support. NCache Enterprise...
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