DBMS > Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison Amazon DynamoDB vs. Cassandra vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

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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

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store

Wide column store

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

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	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

2012

2008

1994

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

free tier for a limited amount of database operations

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

commercial license available

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, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

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)

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

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

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Triggers

yes

by integration with AWS Lambda

yes

only for the SQL API

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

Source-replica replication

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

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

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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