DBMS > Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Fauna vs. GeoMesa vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Fauna vs. GeoMesa vs. Oracle Berkeley DB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A native JSON - document store inspired by Lotus Notes, scalable from globally distributed server-clusters down to mobile phones.

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

GeoMesa is a distributed spatio-temporal DBMS based on various systems as storage layer.

Widely used in-process key-value store

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Key-value store

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	8.30
Rank	#47	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	1.55
Rank	#151	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.86
Rank	#205	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Score	2.01
Rank	#126	Overall
	#21	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Website

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

docs.fauna.com

www.geomesa.org/documentation/stable/user/index.html

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Damien Katz, a former Lotus Notes developer

Fauna, Inc.

CCRi and others

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Initial release

2008

2005

2014

1994

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

5.0.0, May 2024

18.1.40, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available

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

Erlang

Scala

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
ColdFusion
Erlang
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

depending on storage layer

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
Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

depending on storage layer

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

depending on storage layer

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

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.

depending on storage layer

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Identity management, authentication, and access control

yes

depending on the DBMS used for storage

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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