DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. Derby vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. Derby vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

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

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.

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Vector DBMS

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

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	4.71
Rank	#69	Overall
	#37	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#379	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org

db.apache.org/derby

www.hawkular.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

db.apache.org/derby/manuals/index.html

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation

Community supported by Red Hat

Microsoft

Initial release

2007

2008

1997

2014

2015

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

10.17.1.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

yes

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

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC

HTTP REST

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

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

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures

Triggers

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding must be implemented in the application

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

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

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes

using Azure authentication

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...
» more

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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