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

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

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.

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	103.86
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.15
Rank	#123	Overall
	#60	Relational DBMS

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	6.87
Rank	#55	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	3.01
Rank	#101	Overall
	#17	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

hazelcast.com

ravendb.net

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.citusdata.com

firebase.google.com/docs/database

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

ravendb.net/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Hazelcast

Hibernating Rhinos

Initial release

2008

2010

2012

2008

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.1, December 2018

5.3.6, November 2023

5.4, July 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license 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

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Data scheme

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

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

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (RQL)

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

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
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

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

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

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

yes

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Events

yes

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

yes

Replicated Map

Multi-source replication

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 or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

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

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

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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

Role-based access control

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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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