DBMS > Amazon Aurora vs. Cassandra vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Titan

System Properties Comparison Amazon Aurora vs. Cassandra vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Titan

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph.

Description

MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible cloud service by Amazon

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

Titan is a Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters.

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	7.91
Rank	#50	Overall
	#32	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

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

Website

aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

cassandra.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan

Technical documentation

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

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Aurelius, owned by DataStax

Initial release

2015

2008

2010

2014

2012

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache license, version 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

Java

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

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

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

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

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

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

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

Clojure
Java
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

JavaScript

yes

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

via pluggable storage backends

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

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

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graph

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 document possible

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

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

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

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...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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