DBMS > Altibase vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage

System Properties Comparison Altibase vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Microsoft Azure Table Storage

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An enterprise grade, high-performance RDBMS

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

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

A Wide Column Store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	1.02
Rank	#189	Overall
	#88	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	13.64
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	4.04
Rank	#77	Overall
	#6	Wide column stores

Website

altibase.com

cassandra.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/tables

Technical documentation

github.com/ALTIBASE/Documents/tree/master/Manuals

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

Developer

Altibase

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

1999

2008

2005

2012

Current release

v7.3, 2023, August 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open source edition discontinued with March 2023

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

C++

Java

Erlang

Server operating systems

AIX
HP-UX
Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

ANSI SQL-92

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

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C
C++
Java

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

stored procedures and stored functions

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

implicit feature of the cloud service. Replication either local, cross-facility or geo-redundant.

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights based on private key authentication or shared access signatures

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

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Typical application scenarios

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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

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