DBMS > Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. FoundationDB vs. NuoDB

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

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

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Wide column store

Search engine

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

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	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

apple.github.io/foundationdb

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Elastic

FoundationDB

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2010

2013

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.6, January 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

limited edition free

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++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

in SQL-layer only

Java, SQL

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

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

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

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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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