DBMS > Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Quasardb vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Quasardb vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An online MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) data warehousing service based on Greenplum

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	0.68
Rank	#231	Overall
	#105	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/hybriddb-postgresql

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

quasar.ai

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/analyticdb-for-postgresql/latest/product-introduction-overview

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Alibaba / Pivotal Software Inc. / PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

quasardb

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2016

2008

2012

2009

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.14.1, January 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

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++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

integer and binary

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

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

with tags

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

SQL-like query language

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Supported programming languages

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

consistent hashing

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

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 using LevelDB

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

yes

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

Access rights for users and roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

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...
» 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...
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