DBMS > Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Firebird vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Firebird vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica

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.

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Spatial 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	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.kinetica.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.heavy.ai

docs.kinetica.com

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

Firebird Foundation

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Kinetica

Initial release

2008

2005

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2016

2012

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

5.10, January 2022

7.1, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

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.

Implementation language

Java

Erlang

C and C++

C++ and CUDA

C, C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

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

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-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
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
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions in JavaScript

PSQL

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

improved architecture with release 2.0

none

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

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

Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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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