DBMS > AlaSQL vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Hawkular Metrics

System Properties Comparison AlaSQL vs. Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Datastore vs. Hawkular Metrics

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

JavaScript DBMS library

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Automatically scaling NoSQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

Primary database model

Document store
Relational DBMS

Document store
Key-value store

Wide column store

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	0.51
Rank	#256	Overall
	#40	Document stores
	#118	Relational DBMS

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	4.36
Rank	#72	Overall
	#12	Document stores

Score	0.08
Rank	#366	Overall
	#39	Time Series DBMS

Website

alasql.org

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org

cloud.google.com/datastore

www.hawkular.org

Technical documentation

github.com/AlaSQL/alasql

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.google.com/datastore/docs

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

Developer

Andrey Gershun & Mathias R. Wulff

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

Community supported by Red Hat

Initial release

2014

2012

2008

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

MIT-License

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

JavaScript

Java

Server operating systems

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, details here

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to SQL99, but no user access control, stored procedures and host language bindings.

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

SQL-like query language (GQL)

APIs and other access methods

JavaScript API

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST

Supported programming languages

JavaScript

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

using Google App Engine

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Callbacks using the Google Apps Engine

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication using Paxos

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on type of query and configuration

Strong Consistency is default for entity lookups and queries within an Entity Group (but can instead be made eventually consistent). Other queries are always eventual consistent.

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

via ReferenceProperties or Ancestor paths

Transaction concepts

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

yes

only for local storage and DOM-storage

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Serializable Isolation within Transactions, Read Committed outside of Transactions

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using IndexedDB, SQL.JS or proprietary FileStorage

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 and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Market metrics

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