DBMS > BaseX vs. Cassandra vs. Graph Engine vs. RDF4J vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison BaseX vs. Cassandra vs. Graph Engine vs. RDF4J vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Light-weight Native XML DBMS with support for XQuery 3.0 and interactive GUI.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Native XML DBMS

Wide column store

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

RDF store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

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

Score	1.84
Rank	#135	Overall
	#4	Native XML DBMS

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.67
Rank	#232	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#34	Key-value stores

Score	0.74
Rank	#222	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	4.46
Rank	#71	Overall
	#5	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

docs.basex.org

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.timescale.com

Developer

BaseX GmbH

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Microsoft

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

Timescale

Initial release

2007

2008

2010

2004

2017

Current release

10.7, August 2023

4.1.3, July 2023

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

.NET and C

Java

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

.NET

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

XQuery supports types

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
RESTXQ
WebDAV
XML:DB
XQJ

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

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

Supported programming languages

Actionscript
C
C#
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
Qt
Rebol
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

Java
PHP
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

via events

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

none

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

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

multiple readers, single writer

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Isolation support depends on the API used

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept on 4 levels

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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

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Key customers

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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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