DBMS > Blazegraph vs. Cassandra vs. Couchbase vs. IRONdb vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Blazegraph vs. Cassandra vs. Couchbase vs. IRONdb vs. NuoDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Amazon has acquired Blazegraph's domain and (probably) product. It is said that Amazon Neptune is based on Blazegraph.

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

High-performance graph database supporting Semantic Web (RDF/SPARQL) and Graph Database (tinkerpop3, blueprints, vertex-centric) APIs with scale-out and High Availability.

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

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

Score	0.75
Rank	#219	Overall
	#19	Graph DBMS
	#8	RDF stores

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	17.30
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Website

blazegraph.com

cassandra.apache.org

www.couchbase.com

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

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

Technical documentation

wiki.blazegraph.com

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchbase.com

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

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Blazegraph

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Couchbase, Inc.

Circonus LLC.

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2006

2008

2011

2017

2013

Current release

2.1.5, March 2019

4.1.3, July 2023

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

extended commercial license available

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

commercial

limited edition free

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, C++, Go and Erlang

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

Linux
OS X
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

RDF literal types

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

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SPARQL is used as query language

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

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
SPARQL QUERY
SPARQL UPDATE
TinkerPop 3

Proprietary protocol

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

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

.Net
C
C++
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
Ruby

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

yes, in Lua

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Automatic Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in Graphs

yes

Transaction concepts

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

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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

Ephemeral buckets

yes

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Security and Authentication via Web Application Container (Tomcat, Jetty)

Access rights for users can be defined per object

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

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...
» more

News

How to Build a Crystal Image Search App with Vector Search
25 April 2024

Knowledge Graphs for RAG without a GraphDB
18 April 2024

How Winweb Built its AI Assistant with DataStax Astra DB and LangChain
17 April 2024

Vercel + Astra DB: Get Data into Your GenAI Apps Fast
16 April 2024

Simplifying Agent Development with Astra DB Connector for Vertex AI Search
11 April 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.