DBMS > Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IRONdb vs. QuestDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IRONdb vs. QuestDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Primary database model

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	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	2.52
Rank	#109	Overall
	#9	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.exasol.com

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

questdb.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.exasol.com/resources

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

questdb.io/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Exasol

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Circonus LLC.

QuestDB Technology Inc

Initial release

2008

2000

2012

2017

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

C and C++

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

SQL with time-series extensions

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Lua
Python
R

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes, in Lua

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

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

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

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

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

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

yes

ACID for single-table writes

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

through memory mapped files

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

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

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Market metrics

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

Licensing and pricing models

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

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

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