DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. GeoMesa vs. InfluxDB vs. IRONdb

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. GeoMesa vs. InfluxDB vs. IRONdb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

GeoMesa is a distributed spatio-temporal DBMS based on various systems as storage layer.

DBMS for storing time series, events and metrics

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

with GEO package

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	0.78
Rank	#213	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Score	25.83
Rank	#28	Overall
	#1	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.geomesa.org

www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-overview

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.geomesa.org/documentation/stable/user/index.html

docs.influxdata.com/influxdb

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

CCRi and others

Circonus LLC.

Initial release

2008

2012

2014

2013

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

4.0.5, February 2024

2.7.6, April 2024

V0.10.20, January 2018

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

Open Source

MIT-License; commercial enterprise version available

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 and C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X

through Homebrew

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data and Strings

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API
JSON over UDP

HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes, in Lua

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

depending on storage layer

Sharding

in enterprise version only

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

depending on storage layer

selectable replication factor

in enterprise version only

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

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

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

depending on storage layer

Immediate consistency per node, eventual consistency across nodes

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

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.

depending on storage layer

yes

Depending on used storage engine

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

depending on the DBMS used for storage

simple rights management via user accounts

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB , the open source time series database. It...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Time to Value InfluxDB is available in all the popular languages and frameworks,...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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IoT & Sensor Monitoring Developers are witnessing the instrumentation of every available...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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InfluxData has more than 1,900 paying customers, including customers include MuleSoft,...
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Market metrics

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

Fastest-growing database to drive 27,500 GitHub stars Over 750,000 daily active instances
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Open source core with closed source clustering available either on-premise or on...
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