DBMS > Cassandra vs. CrateDB vs. Hypertable vs. Memcached vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CrateDB vs. Hypertable vs. Memcached vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Hypertable has stopped its further development with March 2016 and is removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Distributed Database based on Lucene

An open source BigTable implementation based on distributed file systems such as Hadoop

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Wide column store

Key-value store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.73
Rank	#224	Overall
	#37	Document stores
	#5	Spatial DBMS
	#16	Search engines
	#19	Time Series DBMS
	#8	Vector DBMS

Score	19.42
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cratedb.com/docs

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Crate

Hypertable Inc.

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2013

2009

2003

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

0.9.8.11, March 2016

1.6.25, March 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GNU version 3. Commercial license available

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

Linux
OS X
Windows

an inofficial Windows port is available

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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

restricted

only exact value or prefix value scans

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

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

C++ API
Thrift

Proprietary protocol

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

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

C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions (Javascript)

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

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

selectable replication factor on file system level

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

rights management via user accounts

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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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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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Typical application scenarios

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

IoT: accelerate your IIoT projects with CrateDB, delivering real-time analytics...
» more

Key customers

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

Across all continents, CrateDB is used by companies of all sizes to meet the most...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

The CrateDB open source project was started in 2013 Honorable Mention in 2021 Gartner®...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
» more

See CrateDB pricing >
» more

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