DBMS > Cassandra vs. CrateDB vs. Sphinx vs. Titan

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. CrateDB vs. Sphinx vs. Titan

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Distributed Database based on Lucene

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

Titan is a Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters.

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Search engine

Graph 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	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Website

cassandra.apache.org

cratedb.com

sphinxsearch.com

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cratedb.com/docs

sphinxsearch.com/docs

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Crate

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Aurelius, owned by DataStax

Initial release

2008

2013

2001

2012

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

Apache license, version 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++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All Operating Systems, including Kubernetes with CrateDB Kubernetes Operator support

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible Schema (defined schema, partial schema, 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

full-text index on all search fields

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, but no triggers and constraints, and PostgreSQL compatibility

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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

Proprietary protocol

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

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++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Clojure
Java
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions (Javascript)

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

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

yes

via pluggable storage backends

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

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

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

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graph

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

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

yes

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

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

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

The enterprise database for time series, documents, and vectors. Distributed - Native...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

Response time in milliseconds: e ven for complex ad-hoc queries. Massive scaling...
» more

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®...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

See CrateDB pricing >
» 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.