DBMS > Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. IRONdb vs. Kinetica vs. MySQL

System Properties Comparison Amazon SimpleDB vs. Cassandra vs. IRONdb vs. Kinetica vs. MySQL

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

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

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Widely used open source RDBMS

Primary database model

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
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	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Website

aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org

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

www.kinetica.com

www.mysql.com

Technical documentation

docs.aws.amazon.com/simpledb

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

docs.kinetica.com

dev.mysql.com/doc

Developer

Amazon

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Circonus LLC.

Kinetica

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Initial release

2007

2008

2017

2012

1995

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

7.1, August 2021

8.4.0, April 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

C, C++

C and C++

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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.

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)

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

with proprietary extensions

APIs and other access methods

RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native 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

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

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes, in Lua

user defined functions

yes

proprietary syntax

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

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"

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

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

Source-replica replication

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 per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

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 and roles on table level

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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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

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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