DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Spark SQL

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

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org

hbase.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

hbase.apache.org/book.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2012

2008

2010

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2021

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 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

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free, schema definition possible

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

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#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Coprocessors in Java

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

yes, utilizing Spark Core

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

none

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 or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

atomic operations within a document possible

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

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

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Access rights for users can be defined per database

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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