DBMS > Cassandra vs. Datomic vs. EXASOL vs. H2 vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Datomic vs. EXASOL vs. H2 vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Datomic builds on immutable values, supports point-in-time queries and uses 3rd party systems for durability

High-performance, in-memory, MPP database specifically designed for in-memory analytics.

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	1.66
Rank	#144	Overall
	#66	Relational DBMS

Score	1.76
Rank	#139	Overall
	#62	Relational DBMS

Score	8.33
Rank	#46	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.datomic.com

www.exasol.com/resources

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Cognitect

Exasol

Thomas Mueller

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2012

2000

2005

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.0.6735, June 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

limited edition free

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

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

Java, Clojure

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

yes

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)

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP API

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Clojure
Java

Java
Lua
Python
R

Java

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Transaction Functions

user defined functions

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

By using transaction functions

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

But extensive use of caching in the application peers

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

using external storage systems (e.g. Cassandra, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Couchbase and others)

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

recommended only for testing and development

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users, groups and roles according to SQL-standard

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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