DBMS > Amazon Aurora vs. Apache Cassandra vs. Sphinx vs. Sqrrl vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon Aurora vs. Apache Cassandra vs. Sphinx vs. Sqrrl vs. VoltDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon and became a part of Amazon Web Services. It has been removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible cloud service by Amazon

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Adaptable, secure NoSQL built on Apache Accumulo

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Search engine

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	7.84
Rank	#44	Overall
	#28	Relational DBMS

Score	98.94
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	1.38
Rank	#156	Overall
	#72	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

cassandra.apache.org

sphinxsearch.com

sqrrl.com

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

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

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

sphinxsearch.com/docs

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Amazon

originally Sqrrl Data, Inc.

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2015

2008

2001

2012

2010

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

commercial

Open Source

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

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

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X

for development

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

Proprietary protocol

Accumulo Shell
Java API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Actionscript
C

using GLib
C#
C++
Cocoa
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Java

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Sharding

making use of Hadoop

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

selectable replication factor

making use of Hadoop

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Immediate Consistency

Document store kept consistent with combination of global timestamping, row-level transactions, and server-side consistency resolution.

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

Atomic updates per row, document, or graph entity

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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

Cell-level Security, Data-Centric Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

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...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Market metrics

Apache 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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