DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Postgres-XL

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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

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	108.05
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#99	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	0.33
Rank	#270	Overall
	#123	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Initial release

2008

2010

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

Erlang

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

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.

yes

XML type, but no XML query functionality

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)

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

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 individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

MVCC

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

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