DBMS > Cassandra vs. Citus vs. HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Tigris

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Citus vs. HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Tigris

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

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

A horizontally scalable, ACID transactional, document database available both as a fully managed cloud service and for deployment on self-managed infrastructure

Primary database model

Document store
Key-value store
Search engine
Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

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	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.02
Rank	#369	Overall
	#51	Document stores
	#55	Key-value stores
	#24	Search engines
	#38	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

hbase.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

www.tigrisdata.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.citusdata.com

hbase.apache.org/book.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

www.tigrisdata.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Tigris Data, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2010

2008

2010

2022

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.1, December 2018

2.3.4, January 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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

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

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

CLI Client
gRPC
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

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

Coprocessors in Java

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Triggers

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

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using FoundationDB

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

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights for users and roles

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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