DBMS > 4D vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. QuestDB vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. Cassandra vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. QuestDB 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

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Relational 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	29.04
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

www.4d.com

cassandra.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

questdb.io

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

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

questdb.io/docs

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

4D, Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

QuestDB Technology Inc

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

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

Initial release

1984

2008

2014

1998

Current release

v20, April 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

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.

Implementation language

Java

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

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

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

SQL-like query language

SQL with time-series extensions

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

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

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

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

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

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

over HTTP

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

JavaScript

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

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

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency

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

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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

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

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

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...
» more

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.