DBMS > Cassandra vs. FileMaker vs. Heroic vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. RRDtool

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. FileMaker vs. Heroic vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. RRDtool

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

FileMaker is a cross-platform RDBMS that includes a GUI frontend.

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Widely used in-process key-value store

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

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	48.20
Rank	#20	Overall
	#14	Relational DBMS

Score	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	1.87
Rank	#136	Overall
	#11	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.claris.com/filemaker

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.claris.com/resources/documentation

spotify.github.io/heroic

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/doc

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Claris

a subsidiary of Apple

Spotify

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Tobias Oetiker

Initial release

2008

1983

2014

1994

1999

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

19.4.1, November 2021

18.1.40, May 2020

1.8.0, 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

GPL V2 and FLOSS

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, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

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

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

iOS

client part only
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

HP-UX
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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.

yes

A http query request can return the data in XML format

yes

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

Exporting into and restoring from XML files possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

via plugins

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Filemaker WebDirect
JDBC
ODBC

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

in-process shared library
Pipes

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

PHP

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
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

only for the SQL API

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication, warm standby

since Version 14

yes

Source-replica replication

none

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

none

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

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

simple rights management via user accounts and connection to external directory services

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

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Key customers

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Market metrics

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