DBMS > Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. QuestDB vs. Spark SQL vs. Teradata

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. ClickHouse vs. QuestDB vs. Spark SQL vs. Teradata

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 open source SQL database for time series data

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

A hybrid cloud data analytics software platform (Teradata Vantage)

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series 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	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Score	45.33
Rank	#21	Overall
	#15	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

clickhouse.com/docs

questdb.io/docs

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

docs.teradata.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Clickhouse Inc.

QuestDB Technology Inc

Apache Software Foundation

Teradata

Initial release

2008

2016

2014

1984

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

Teradata Vantage 1.0 MU2, January 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

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 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.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Scala

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

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

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

Join-index to prejoin tables, aggregate index, sparse index, hash index

SQL

Support of SQL

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

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL with time-series extensions

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

SQL 2016 + extensions

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

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API
HTTP REST
JDBC
JMS Adapter
ODBC
OLE DB

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

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Java
Python
R
Scala

C
C++
Cobol
Java (JDBC-ODBC)
Perl
PL/1
Python
R
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

UDFs, stored procedures, table functions in parallel

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

key based and custom

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Sharding

Hashing

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.

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

none

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

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 for single-table writes

ACID

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

through memory mapped files

yes

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

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

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...
» more

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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