DBMS > Apache Druid vs. Cassandra vs. Heroic vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Druid vs. Cassandra vs. Heroic vs. RRDtool vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

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

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Wide column store

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	3.25
Rank	#90	Overall
	#47	Relational DBMS
	#7	Time Series DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.46
Rank	#265	Overall
	#22	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

druid.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

druid.apache.org/docs/latest/design

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

spotify.github.io/heroic

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation and contributors

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Spotify

Tobias Oetiker

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2012

2008

2014

1999

2014

Current release

29.0.1, April 2024

4.1.3, July 2023

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache license v2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

commercial

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

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Unix

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

hosted

Data scheme

yes

schema-less columns are supported

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via Elasticsearch

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL for querying

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Proprietary protocol

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

in-process shared library
Pipes

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

Clojure
JavaScript
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

manual/auto, time-based

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes, via HDFS, S3 or other storage engines

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

none

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

User concepts

Access control

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

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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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