DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. NuoDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Analytic DBMS for Hadoop

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.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

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	14.03
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	103.86
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	10.26
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	15.00
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.99
Rank	#195	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Website

impala.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

firebase.google.com/docs/database

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Cloudera

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

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2013

2008

2005

2012

2013

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

limited edition free

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

C++

Java

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC

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
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

View functions in JavaScript

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

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

Managed transparently by NuoDB

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

query execution via MapReduce

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

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

atomic operations within a single document possible

yes

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users, groups and roles

based on Apache Sentry and Kerberos

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

More information provided by the system vendor

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