DBMS > Cassandra vs. CockroachDB vs. H2 vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CockroachDB vs. H2 vs. Snowflake vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

CockroachDB is a distributed database architected for modern cloud applications. It is wire compatible with PostgreSQL and backed by a Key-Value Store, which is either RocksDB or a purpose-built derivative, called Pebble.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	6.15
Rank	#55	Overall
	#33	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.cockroachlabs.com

www.h2database.com

www.snowflake.com

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.cockroachlabs.com/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Cockroach Labs

Thomas Mueller

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2008

2015

2005

2014

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

23.1.1, May 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0, commercial license available

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

dynamic schema

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, wire compatible with PostgreSQL

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust

Java

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning (by key range)

all tables are translated to an ordered KV store and then broken down into 64MB ranges, which are then used as replicas in RAFT

none

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication using RAFT

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

yes

yes, each node contains all data

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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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