DBMS > Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica vs. RethinkDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Elasticsearch vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Kinetica vs. RethinkDB

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 high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

DBMS for the Web with a mechanism to push updated query results to applications in realtime.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Spatial DBMS
Vector DBMS

Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	132.83
Rank	#7	Overall
	#1	Search engines

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	0.66
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	2.66
Rank	#107	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.kinetica.com

rethinkdb.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

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

docs.heavy.ai

docs.kinetica.com

rethinkdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Elastic

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Kinetica

The Linux Foundation

since July 2017

Initial release

2008

2010

2016

2012

2009

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.6, January 2023

5.10, January 2022

7.1, August 2021

2.4.1, August 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2

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 CUDA

C, C++

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

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

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, binary, float, bool, date, geometry

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

yes

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

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP 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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

community-supported driver
C#

community-supported driver
C++

community-supported driver
Clojure

community-supported driver
Dart

community-supported driver
Erlang

community-supported driver
Go

community-supported driver
Haskell

community-supported driver
Java

official driver
JavaScript (Node.js)

official driver
Lisp

community-supported driver
Lua

community-supported driver
Objective-C

community-supported driver
Perl

community-supported driver
PHP

community-supported driver
Python

official driver
Ruby

official driver
Scala

community-supported driver

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

yes

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

Client-side triggers through changefeeds

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Round robin

Sharding

range based

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

Source-replica replication

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

ES-Hadoop Connector

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

Atomic single-document operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC based

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles on table level

yes

users and table-level permissions

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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