DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. BigchainDB vs. Cassandra vs. SAP HANA vs. VoltDB

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. BigchainDB vs. Cassandra vs. SAP HANA vs. VoltDB

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

BigchainDB is scalable blockchain database offering decentralization, immutability and native assets

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

In-memory, column based data store. Available as appliance or cloud service

Distributed In-Memory NewSQL RDBMS

Used for OLTP applications with a high frequency of relatively simple transactions, that can hold all their data in memory

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS

with SAP Hana, Enterprise Edition
Spatial DBMS

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

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

Score	0.79
Rank	#212	Overall
	#36	Document stores

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	44.69
Rank	#22	Overall
	#16	Relational DBMS

Score	1.44
Rank	#158	Overall
	#73	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

www.bigchaindb.com

cassandra.apache.org

www.sap.com/products/hana.html

www.voltdb.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

bigchaindb.readthedocs.io/en/latest

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

help.sap.com/hana

docs.voltdb.com

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

SAP

VoltDB Inc.

Initial release

2007

2016

2008

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.0 SPS07 (April 4, 2023), April 2023

11.3, April 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

AGPL v3

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

AGPL for Community Edition, commercial license for Enterprise, AWS, and Pro Editions

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

also available as a cloud based service

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

Python

Java

Java, C++

Server operating systems

hosted

Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Appliance or cloud-service

Linux
OS X

for development

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

only a subset of SQL 99

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC

Java API
JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

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

Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Erlang

not officially supported
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

SQLScript, R

Java

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"

yes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

FOREIGN KEY constraints are not supported

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

ACID

Transactions are executed single-threaded within stored procedures

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Data access is serialized by the server

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes,with MongoDB ord RethinkDB

yes

Snapshots and command logging

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)

yes

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes

Users and roles with access to stored procedures

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Competitive advantages

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Typical application scenarios

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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Licensing and pricing models

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