DBMS > Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Kinetica vs. Prometheus

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Kinetica vs. Prometheus

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

Open-source Time Series DBMS and monitoring system

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	135.35
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.64
Rank	#236	Overall
	#109	Relational DBMS

Score	8.42
Rank	#47	Overall
	#2	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.kinetica.com

prometheus.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

firebase.google.com/docs/database

docs.kinetica.com

prometheus.io/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Elastic

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Kinetica

Initial release

2008

2010

2012

2015

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.6, January 2023

7.1, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

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, C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux

Linux
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data only

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.

Import of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C++
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Source-replica replication

yes

by Federation

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

none

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

yes

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.

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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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