DBMS > Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Infobright vs. RRDtool

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. Infobright vs. RRDtool

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

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

High performant column-oriented DBMS for analytic workloads using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a frontend

Industry standard data logging and graphing tool for time series data. RRD is an acronym for round-robin database.

The data is stored in a circular buffer, thus the system storage footprint remains constant over 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	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	0.96
Rank	#194	Overall
	#91	Relational DBMS

Score	1.87
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

cloud.google.com/spanner

ignitetech.com/softwarelibrary/infobrightdb

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Elastic

Google

Ignite Technologies Inc.; formerly InfoBright Inc.

Tobias Oetiker

Initial release

2008

2010

2017

2005

1999

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.6, January 2023

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

commercial

The open source (GPLv2) version did not support inserts/updates/deletes and was discontinued with July 2016

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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

Implementations in Java (e.g. RRD4J) and C# available

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Linux
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

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

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.

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

All search fields are automatically indexed

yes

Knowledge Grid Technology used instead

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

yes

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

in-process shared library
Pipes

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

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

with librrd library
C#

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Java

with a different implementation of RRDTool
JavaScript (Node.js)

with a different implementation of RRDTool
Lua
Perl
PHP

with a wrapper library
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

Source-replica replication

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

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

none

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

by using the rrdcached daemon

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

exploiting MySQL or PostgreSQL frontend capabilities

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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