DBMS > Cassandra vs. CrateDB vs. GraphDB vs. Milvus vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CrateDB vs. GraphDB vs. Milvus vs. Virtuoso

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Distributed Database based on Lucene

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.

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Vector DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.71
Rank	#227	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

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

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#3	Vector DBMS

Score	4.27
Rank	#73	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#39	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cratedb.com/docs

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Social network pages

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Crate

Ontotext

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2008

2013

2000

2019

1998

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

10.4, October 2023

2.3.4, January 2024

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license 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.

CrateDB Cloud: a distributed SQL database that spreads data and processing across an elastic cluster of shared nothing nodes. CrateDB Cloud enables data insights at scale on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, schema free)

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

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

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

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

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

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Prometheus Remote Read/Write
RESTful HTTP API

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

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.NET
Erlang
Go

community maintained client
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

community maintained client
Perl

community maintained client
PHP
Python
R
Ruby

community maintained client
Scala

community maintained client

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

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions (Javascript)

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Configurable replication on table/partition-level

Multi-source replication

Chain, star, and bi-directional 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
Read-after-write consistency on record level

Immediate Consistency, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

unique row identifiers can be used for implementing an optimistic concurrency control strategy

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

rights management via user accounts

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.

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
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Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
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Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
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GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
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Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
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Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
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GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
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Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
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GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
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As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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See CrateDB pricing >
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GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
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Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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