DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. IRONdb vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. IRONdb vs. RDF4J

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

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

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Primary database model

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	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org

www.exasol.com

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

rdf4j.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.exasol.com/resources

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Exasol

Circonus LLC.

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Initial release

2007

2008

2000

2017

2004

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

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

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

HTTP API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

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
Lua
Python
R

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Java
PHP
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes, in Lua

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"

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

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

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

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

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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 rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

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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