DBMS > Cassandra vs. Datastax Enterprise vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Postgres-XL

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Datastax Enterprise vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. Postgres-XL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) is the always-on, scalable data platform built on Apache Cassandra and designed for hybrid Cloud. DSE integrates graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring into a unified platform.

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Search engine
Vector DBMS

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	5.80
Rank	#60	Overall
	#4	Wide column stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	7.85
Rank	#51	Overall
	#8	Document stores

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.datastax.com/products/datastax-enterprise

github.com/apple/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

www.postgres-xl.org

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.datastax.com

apple.github.io/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

DataStax

FoundationDB

Google

Initial release

2008

2011

2013

2017

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

6.8, April 2020

6.2.28, November 2020

10 R1, October 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

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Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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

XML type, but no XML query functionality

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL); Spark SQL

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

distributed, parallel query execution

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language)
TinkerPop Gremlin

with DSE Graph

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

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

C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware, advanced replication for edge computing

yes

Multi-source replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency
Tunable Consistency

consistency level can be individually decided with each write operation

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

yes

ACID

MVCC

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

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

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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DataStax Enterprise is scale-out data infrastructure for enterprises that need to...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Supporting the following application requirements: Zero downtime - Built on Apache...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Applications that must be massively and linearly scalable with 100% uptime and able...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Capital One, Cisco, Comcast, eBay, McDonald's, Microsoft, Safeway, Sony, UBS, and...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Among the Forbes 100 Most Innovative Companies, DataStax is trusted by 5 of the top...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Annual subscription
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