DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Apache Drill vs. Cassandra vs. Graph Engine

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Apache Drill vs. Cassandra vs. Graph Engine

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Hosted simple database service by Amazon, with the data stored in the Amazon Cloud.

There is an unrelated product called SimpleDB developed by Edward Sciore

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Primary database model

Key-value store

Document store
Relational DBMS

Wide column store

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	1.85
Rank	#138	Overall
	#24	Key-value stores

Score	1.95
Rank	#127	Overall
	#23	Document stores
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

drill.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.graphengine.io

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

drill.apache.org/docs

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

Initial release

2007

2012

2008

2010

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

.NET and C

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

.NET

Data scheme

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

All columns are indexed automatically

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

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

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Erlang
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C++

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be specified for read operations

none

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

Concurrent data updates can be detected by the application

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

In-memory capabilities

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

Depending on the underlying data source

yes

User concepts

Access control

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

Depending on the underlying data source

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

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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

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