DBMS > Cassandra vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Greenplum vs. Hazelcast

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Citus vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Greenplum vs. Hazelcast

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Scalable hybrid operational and analytics RDBMS for big data use cases based on PostgreSQL

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Analytic Database platform built on PostgreSQL. Full name is Pivotal Greenplum Database

A logical database in Greenplum is an array of individual PostgreSQL databases working together to present a single database image.

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.21
Rank	#118	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	8.37
Rank	#48	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

greenplum.org

hazelcast.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.greenplum.org

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Pivotal Software Inc.

Hazelcast

Initial release

2008

2010

2012

2005

2008

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.1, December 2018

7.0.0, September 2023

5.3.6, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

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

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

hosted

Linux

All OS with a Java VM

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

specific XML type available, but no XML query functionality

yes

since Version 4.2

yes

the object must implement a serialization strategy

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

realized in proprietary language PL/pgSQL or with common languages like Perl, Python, Tcl etc.

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

other methods possible by using 3rd party extensions

Source-replica replication

yes

Replicated Map

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

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

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

yes

ACID

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

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 rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

yes, based on authentication and database rules

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Role-based access control

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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