DBMS > Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Kdb vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. EXASOL vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Kdb vs. Snowflake

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.

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

High performance Time Series DBMS

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

Relational 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	1.99
Rank	#124	Overall
	#58	Relational DBMS

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	7.55
Rank	#53	Overall
	#3	Time Series DBMS
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.exasol.com

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

kx.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.exasol.com/resources

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

code.kx.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Exasol

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Kx Systems, a division of First Derivatives plc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2000

2010

2000

kdb was released 2000, kdb+ in 2003

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.6, May 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free 32-bit version

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

table attribute 'grouped'

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query language (q)

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

.Net
JDBC
ODBC
WebSocket

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP API
JDBC
Jupyter
Kafka
ODBC
WebSocket

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
Lua
Python
R

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C
C#
C++
Go
J
Java
JavaScript
Lua
MatLab
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Scala

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

with views

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

yes

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

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Hadoop integration

yes

similar paradigm used for internal processing

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

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

atomic operations within a document possible

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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 rights for users can be defined per database

rights management via user accounts

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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Integrated columnar database & programming system for streaming, real time and historical...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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provides seamless scalability; runs on industry standard server platforms; is top-ranked...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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tick database streaming sensor data massive intelligence applications oil and gas...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch J.P. Morgan Deutsche Bank IEX Securities...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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kdb+ performance and reliability proven by our customers in critical infrastructure...
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Licensing and pricing models

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