DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Citus vs. Newts vs. Sphinx vs. SQL.JS

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Citus vs. Newts vs. Sphinx vs. SQL.JS

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

Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Port of SQLite to JavaScript

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

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

Score	98.94
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.13
Rank	#117	Overall
	#56	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#385	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.97
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.53
Rank	#246	Overall
	#115	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.citusdata.com

opennms.github.io/newts

sphinxsearch.com

sql.js.org

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.citusdata.com

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

sphinxsearch.com/docs

sql.js.org/documentation/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

OpenNMS Group

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Alon Zakai

enhancements implemented by others

Initial release

2008

2010

2014

2001

2012

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

8.1, December 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

AGPL, commercial license also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

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++

JavaScript

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

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

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

standard, with numerous extensions

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

yes

SQL-92 is not fully supported

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

HTTP REST
Java API

Proprietary protocol

JavaScript 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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

JavaScript

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

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

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

none

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

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

none

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

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

none

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

except by serializing a db to a file

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

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...
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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

Apache 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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