DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. Fauna vs. GeoMesa

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. Fauna vs. GeoMesa

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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

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

GeoMesa is a distributed spatio-temporal DBMS based on various systems as storage layer.

Primary database model

Key-value store

Wide column store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.78
Rank	#213	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org

fauna.com

www.geomesa.org

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.fauna.com

www.geomesa.org/documentation/stable/user/index.html

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Fauna, Inc.

CCRi and others

Initial release

2007

2008

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

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

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

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)

APIs and other access methods

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++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

consistent hashing

depending on storage layer

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

depending on storage layer

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

depending on storage layer

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.

depending on storage layer

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

Identity management, authentication, and access control

yes

depending on the DBMS used for storage

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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