DBMS > Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. eXtremeDB vs. GridGain vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. eXtremeDB vs. GridGain vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

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

Natively in-memory DBMS with options for persistency, high-availability and clustering

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Wide column store

Search engine

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

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	0.74
Rank	#223	Overall
	#103	Relational DBMS
	#18	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

www.mcobject.com

www.gridgain.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

www.mcobject.com/docs/extremedb.htm

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Elastic

McObject

GridGain Systems, Inc.

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2008

2010

2001

2007

1992

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.6, January 2023

8.2, 2021

GridGain 8.5.1

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

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++

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

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

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.

support of XML interfaces available

yes

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

yes

with the option: eXtremeSQL

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

.NET Client API
JDBC
JNI
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

ADO.NET
HTTP API
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#
C++
Java
Lua
Python
Scala

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

by defining events

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

horizontal partitioning / sharding

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Active Replication Fabric™ for IoT
Multi-source replication

by means of eXtremeDB Cluster option
Source-replica replication

by means of eXtremeDB High Availability option

yes (replicated cache)

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

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

Optimistic (MVCC) and pessimistic (locking) strategies available

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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eXtremeDB is an in-memory and/or persistent database system that offers an ultra-small...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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eXtremeDB databases can be modeled relationally or as objects and can utilize SQL...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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IoT application across all markets: Industrial Control, Netcom, Telecom, Defense,...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Schneider Electronics, F5 Networks, TNS, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, GoPro, ViaSat,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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With hundreds of customers and over 30 million devices/applications using the product...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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For server use cases, there is a simple per-server license irrespective of the number...
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