DBMS > Apache Phoenix vs. Cassandra vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Apache Phoenix vs. Cassandra vs. Snowflake

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Name

Description

A scale-out RDBMS with evolutionary schema built on Apache HBase

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

Primary database model

Relational DBMS

Wide column 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	1.97
Rank	#126	Overall
	#59	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

phoenix.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

phoenix.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2014

2008

2014

Current release

5.0-HBase2, July 2018 and 4.15-HBase1, December 2019

4.1.3, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

Server operating systems

Linux
Unix
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

yes

late-bound, schema-on-read capabilities

schema-free

yes

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

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

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC

Proprietary protocol

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

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
C#
C++
Go
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

no "single point of failure"

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Hadoop integration

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

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

User concepts

Access control

Access Control Lists (using HBase ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC, multi-tenancy

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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