DBMS > Cassandra vs. Faircom DB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Faircom DB vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Native high-speed multi-model DBMS for relational and key-value store data simultaneously accessible through SQL and NoSQL APIs.

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Wide column store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Relational DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.20
Rank	#318	Overall
	#48	Key-value stores
	#141	Relational DBMS

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#379	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.faircom.com/products/faircom-db

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.hawkular.org

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.faircom.com/docs/en/UUID-7446ae34-a1a7-c843-c894-d5322e395184.html

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

FairCom Corporation

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Community supported by Red Hat

Timescale

Initial release

2008

1979

2012

2014

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

V12, November 2020

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Restricted, free version available

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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

ANSI C, C++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
QNX
SCO
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

easily portable to other OSs

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema free, schema optional, schema required, partial schema,

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, ANSI SQL Types, JSON, typed binary structures

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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.

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, ANSI SQL with proprietary extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
Direct SQL
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP/JSON API
RESTful MQTT/JSON API
RPC

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js and browser)
PHP
Python
Visual Basic

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

.Net, JavaScript, C/C++

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

File partitioning, horizontal partitioning, sharding

Customizable business rules for table partitioning

Sharding

based on Cassandra

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes, configurable to be parallel or serial, synchronous or asynchronous, uni-directional or bi-directional, ACID-consistent or eventually consistent (with custom conflict resolution).

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

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
Immediate Consistency
Tunable consistency per server, database, table, and transaction

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

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

tunable from ACID to Eventually Consistent

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes, tunable from durable to delayed durability to in-memory

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard with additional protections for files

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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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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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