DBMS > Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. HBase vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. HBase vs. Snowflake vs. TerarkDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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.

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

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

A key-value store forked from RocksDB with advanced compression algorithms. It can be used standalone or as a storage engine for MySQL and MongoDB

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#60	Key-value stores

Website

github.com/bytedance/terarkdb

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.exasol.com/resources

hbase.apache.org/book.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

bytedance.larkoffice.com/docs/doccnZmYFqHBm06BbvYgjsHHcKc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Exasol

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

Snowflake Computing Inc.

ByteDance, originally Terark

Initial release

2008

2000

2008

2014

2016

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

restricted open source version available

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++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free, schema definition possible

yes

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

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

C++ API
Java API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Lua
Python
R

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Coprocessors in Java

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

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.

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

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

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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