DBMS > Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. FeatureBase vs. GraphDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. FeatureBase vs. GraphDB

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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.

Real-time database platform that powers real-time analytics and machine learning applications by simultaneously executing low-latency, high-throughput, and highly concurrent workloads.

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

Primary database model

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	0.31
Rank	#292	Overall
	#135	Relational DBMS

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

docs.featurebase.com

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

Social network pages

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

Molecula and Pilosa Open Source Contributors

Ontotext

Initial release

2008

2005

2017

2000

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

2022, May 2022

10.4, October 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

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

Erlang

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL queries

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC
JDBC
Kafka Connector
ODBC

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

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

Java
Python

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

Sharding

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

yes

Multi-source 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, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

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

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, using Linux fsync

yes

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

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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Key customers

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

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
» more

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

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