DBMS > Apache Drill vs. Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. IRONdb vs. RDF4J

System Properties Comparison Apache Drill vs. Cassandra vs. Firebird 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

Schema-free SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

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

Document store
Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	2.02
Rank	#124	Overall
	#22	Document stores
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Website

drill.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

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

rdf4j.org

Technical documentation

drill.apache.org/docs

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

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

rdf4j.org/documentation

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Circonus LLC.

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

Initial release

2012

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2017

2004

Current release

1.20.3, January 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
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

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL SELECT statement is SQL:2003 compliant

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

yes

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

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Supported programming languages

C++

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.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

PSQL

yes, in Lua

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Automatic, metric affinity per node

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

none

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

Depending on the underlying data source

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.

Depending on the underlying data source

User concepts

Access control

Depending on the underlying data source

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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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