DBMS > 4D vs. Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. HEAVY.AI vs. TimesTen

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	2.58
Rank	#108	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

docs.heavy.ai

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

4D, Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

1984

2008

2017

2016

1998

Current release

v20, April 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

5.10, January 2022

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++ and CUDA

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

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

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Round robin

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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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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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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