DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Apache Druid vs. Couchbase

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Apache Druid vs. Couchbase

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Open-source analytics data store designed for sub-second OLAP queries on high dimensionality and high cardinality data

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS
Wide column store

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

Score	108.05
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	3.18
Rank	#84	Overall
	#45	Relational DBMS
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	13.82
Rank	#38	Overall
	#5	Document stores
	#3	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

druid.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

docs.couchbase.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Couchbase, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2012

2011

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

30.0.0, June 2024

Server: 7.6, March 2024; Mobile: 3.3, August 2024; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), September 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache license v2

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C, C++, Go and Erlang

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-less columns are supported

schema-free

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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL for querying

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

manual/auto, time-based

Automatic Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

Multi-source replication

including cross data center 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 individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

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

Ephemeral buckets

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

RBAC using LDAP or Druid internals for users and groups for read/write by datasource and system

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

More information provided by the system vendor

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

Couchbase climbs up the DB-Engines Ranking, increasing its popularity by 10% every month
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