DBMS > Cassandra vs. Fauna vs. MaxDB vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Fauna vs. MaxDB vs. Snowflake

Please select another system to include it in the comparison.

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Fauna provides a web-native interface, with support for GraphQL and custom business logic that integrates seamlessly with the rest of the serverless ecosystem. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute platform is fast, consistent, and reliable, with a modern security infrastructure.

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.55
Rank	#151	Overall
	#26	Document stores
	#14	Graph DBMS
	#71	Relational DBMS
	#13	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.26
Rank	#114	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.fauna.com

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Fauna, Inc.

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2014

1984

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

7.9.10.12, February 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Limited community edition free

commercial

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

Scala

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

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

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby
Scala
Swift

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning

consistent hashing

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

yes

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

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

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Identity management, authentication, and access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
» more

News

An Introduction to David Jones-Gilardi, Developer Relations
11 June 2024

Introducing Tejas Kumar, Developer Relations Engineer
7 June 2024

Indexing All of Wikipedia on a Laptop
5 June 2024

An Introduction to Phil Nash, Developer Relations
3 June 2024

Focus on Creativity, Not Clusters: DataStax Mission Control in Action!
30 May 2024

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.