DBMS > Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica vs. Postgres-XL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Document store
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	16.34
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

clickhouse.com

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.kinetica.com

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.heavy.ai

docs.kinetica.com

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Clickhouse Inc.

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Kinetica

Initial release

2008

2016

2012

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

5.10, January 2022

7.1, August 2021

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

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.

DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.

Implementation language

Java

C++

C++ and CUDA

C, C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

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

XML type, 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)

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

key based and custom

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication

Source-replica 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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

MVCC

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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...
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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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