DBMS > Apache Impala vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. GeoSpock vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Apache Impala vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. GeoSpock vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

GeoSpock seems to be discontinued. Therefore it will be excluded from the DB-Engines ranking.

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.

Spatial and temporal data processing engine for extreme data scale

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Document store

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	13.77
Rank	#40	Overall
	#24	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	9.30
Rank	#45	Overall
	#7	Document stores

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

impala.apache.org

cassandra.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

geospock.com

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

Technical documentation

impala.apache.org/impala-docs.html

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

www.xtdb.com/docs

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

GeoSpock

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2013

2008

2005

2019

Current release

4.1.0, June 2022

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

2.0, September 2019

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache Version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

C++

Java

Erlang

Java, Javascript

Clojure

Server operating systems

Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

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

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

temporal, categorical

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

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

ANSI SQL for query only (using Presto)

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

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

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and integration of map-reduce

View functions in JavaScript

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

Automatic 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, each node contains all data

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

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

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.

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

Access rights for users can be defined per table

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

Typical application scenarios

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

Key customers

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

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...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.