DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. TimesTen

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Geode vs. Microsoft Azure SQL Database vs. TimesTen

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

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.

Geode is a distributed data container, pooling memory, CPU, network resources, and optionally local disk across multiple processes

Database as a Service offering with high compatibility to Microsoft SQL Server

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS

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	1.92
Rank	#131	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	77.99
Rank	#16	Overall
	#11	Relational DBMS

Score	1.31
Rank	#163	Overall
	#74	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

geode.apache.org

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-sql/database

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

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

geode.apache.org/docs

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Originally developed by Gemstone. They outsourced the project to Apache in 2015 but still deliver a commercial version as Gemfire.

Microsoft

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Initial release

2008

2012

2002

2010

1998

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.1, February 2017

V12

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

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

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

the JDK (8 or later) is also required

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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)

SQL-like query language (OQL)

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
All JVM based languages
C++
Groovy
Java
Scala

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

user defined functions

Transact SQL

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

yes, with always 3 replicas available

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

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

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

yes

yes, on a single node

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access rights per client and object definable

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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