DBMS > Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebird vs. Quasardb vs. TigerGraph

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. Firebird vs. Quasardb vs. TigerGraph

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

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

A complete, distributed, parallel graph computing platform supporting web-scale data analytics in real-time

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector 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	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.83
Rank	#139	Overall
	#13	Graph DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.firebirdsql.org

quasar.ai

www.tigergraph.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

doc.quasar.ai/master

docs.tigergraph.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Elastic

Firebird Foundation

quasardb

Initial release

2008

2010

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2009

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.6, January 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

commercial

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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++

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

integer and binary

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

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

yes

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (GSQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

HTTP API

GSQL (TigerGraph Query Language)
Kafka
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

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

C++
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

PSQL

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Sharding

consistent hashing

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

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

with 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

Eventual Consistency

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

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graphs

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

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

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

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

Role-based access control

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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