DBMS > Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. RRDtool vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. RRDtool vs. Sphinx

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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.

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over time.

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

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	1.90
Rank	#132	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Score	5.95
Rank	#55	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

cassandra.apache.org

couchdb.apache.org

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.couchdb.org/en/stable

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

sphinxsearch.com/docs

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

Tobias Oetiker

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2008

2005

1999

2001

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.3.3, December 2023

1.8.0, 2022

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
BSD
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via views

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

in-process shared library
Pipes

Proprietary protocol

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

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

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

none

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

none

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

strategy: optimistic locking

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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...
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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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News

An Introduction to David Jones-Gilardi, Developer Relations
11 June 2024

Introducing Tejas Kumar, Developer Relations Engineer
7 June 2024

Indexing All of Wikipedia on a Laptop
5 June 2024

An Introduction to Phil Nash, Developer Relations
3 June 2024

Focus on Creativity, Not Clusters: DataStax Mission Control in Action!
30 May 2024

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