DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. H2 vs. InfinityDB vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. H2 vs. InfinityDB vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

A Java embedded Key-Value Store which extends the Java Map interface

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

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	74.07
Rank	#17	Overall
	#3	Document stores
	#2	Key-value stores

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#378	Overall
	#57	Key-value stores

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org

www.h2database.com

boilerbay.com

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

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

boilerbay.com/infinitydb/manual

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Thomas Mueller

Boiler Bay Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2012

2008

2005

2002

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

4.0

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

nested virtual Java Maps, multi-value, logical â€˜tuple spaceâ€™ runtime Schema upgrade

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

all Java primitives, Date, CLOB, BLOB, huge sparse arrays

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

manual creation possible, using inversions based on multi-value capability

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC

Access via java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentNavigableMap Interface
Proprietary API to InfinityDB ItemSpace (boilerbay.com/docs/ItemSpaceDataStructures.htm)

HTTP REST
JDBC

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

Java

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

none

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

may be implemented via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)

yes

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

READ-COMMITTED or SERIALIZED

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

manual creation possible, using inversions based on multi-value capability

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

Optimistic locking for transactions; no isolation for bulk loads

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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