DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. Drizzle vs. Quasardb vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. Drizzle vs. Quasardb vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Drizzle has published its last release in September 2012. The open-source project is discontinued and Drizzle is excluded from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

Hosted, scalable database service by Amazon with the data stored in Amazons cloud

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

MySQL fork with a pluggable micro-kernel and with an emphasis of performance over compatibility.

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	74.45
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.21
Rank	#322	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.23
Rank	#316	Overall
	#27	Graph DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org

quasar.ai

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

doc.quasar.ai/master

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Drizzle project, originally started by Brian Aker

quasardb

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2012

2008

2009

2018

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

7.2.4, September 2012

3.14.1, January 2024

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GNU GPL

commercial

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

Open Source

GPL V3

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC

HTTP API

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

.Net
ColdFusion
Erlang
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C++
Java
PHP

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

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

hooks for callbacks inside the server can be used.

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

consistent hashing

Graph Partitioning

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

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

Journaling Streams

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

ACID across one or more tables within a single AWS account and region

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

in-memory journaling

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles can be defined via the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Pluggable authentication mechanisms

e.g. LDAP, HTTP

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

Role-based access control

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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