DBMS > Cassandra vs. Citus vs. MySQL vs. Solr vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Citus vs. MySQL vs. Solr vs. Weaviate

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

Widely used open source RDBMS

A widely used distributed, scalable search engine based on Apache Lucene

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key/Value like access via memcached API

Search engine

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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	1083.74
Rank	#2	Overall
	#2	Relational DBMS

Score	42.91
Rank	#24	Overall
	#3	Search engines

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.citusdata.com

dev.mysql.com/doc

solr.apache.org/resources.html

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Oracle

since 2010, originally MySQL AB, then Sun

Apache Software Foundation

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2008

2010

1995

2006

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.1, December 2018

8.4.0, April 2024

9.6.0, April 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

GPL version 2. Commercial licenses with extended functionallity are available

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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.

Aiven for MySQL: Fully managed MySQL, deployable in the cloud of your choice, with seamless integrations and lightning-fast setup.

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

runs as a servlet in servlet container (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty is included)

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic Fields enables on-the-fly addition of new fields

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

supports customizable data types and automatic typing

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

yes

with proprietary extensions

Solr Parallel SQL Interface

GraphQL is used as 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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON 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

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

.Net
Erlang
Java
JavaScript
any language that supports sockets and either XML or JSON
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

yes

proprietary syntax

Java plugins

Triggers

yes

User configurable commands triggered on index changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

horizontal partitioning, sharding with MySQL Cluster or MySQL Fabric

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

spark-solr: github.com/lucidworks/spark-solr and streaming expressions to reduce

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

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

not for MyISAM storage engine

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

optimistic locking

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

table locks or row locks depending on storage engine

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

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

no user groups or roles

yes

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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