DBMS > Amazon Aurora vs. Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Aurora vs. Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. VoltDB vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible cloud service by Amazon

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	7.57
Rank	#51	Overall
	#32	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#157	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

cassandra.apache.org

www.exasol.com

www.voltdb.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_Aurora.html

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.voltdb.com

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Exasol

VoltDB Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2015

2008

2000

2010

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

11.3, April 2022

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

Open Source

MIT License

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, C++

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X

for development

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

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

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Lua
Python
R

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Snapshots and command logging

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

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...
» 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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