DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Graph Engine vs. SQLite vs. Virtuoso

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Graph Engine vs. SQLite vs. Virtuoso

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.

A distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed RAM store and a general distributed computation engine

Widely used embeddable, in-process RDBMS

Virtuoso is a multi-model hybrid-RDBMS that supports management of data represented as relational tables and/or property graphs

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

Graph DBMS
Key-value store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Native XML DBMS
Relational DBMS
RDF store
Search engine

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	0.61
Rank	#240	Overall
	#21	Graph DBMS
	#35	Key-value stores

Score	114.32
Rank	#10	Overall
	#7	Relational DBMS

Score	4.26
Rank	#78	Overall
	#13	Document stores
	#4	Graph DBMS
	#2	Native XML DBMS
	#42	Relational DBMS
	#2	RDF stores
	#9	Search engines

Website

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.graphengine.io

www.sqlite.org

virtuoso.openlinksw.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.graphengine.io/docs/manual

www.sqlite.org/docs.html

docs.openlinksw.com/virtuoso

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Microsoft

Dwayne Richard Hipp

OpenLink Software

Initial release

2008

2012

2010

2000

1998

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.45.3 (15 April 2024), April 2024

7.2.11, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

Open Source

Public Domain

Open Source

GPLv2, extended commercial license available

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

.NET and C

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

.NET

server-less

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

dynamic column types

yes

SQL - Standard relational schema
RDF - Quad (S, P, O, G) or Triple (S, P, O)
XML - DTD, XML Schema
DAV - freeform filesystem objects, plus User Defined Types a/k/a Dynamic Extension Type

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

not rigid because of 'dynamic typing' concept.

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

SQL-92 is not fully supported

yes

SQL-92, SQL-200x, SQL-3, SQLX

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET

inofficial driver
JDBC

inofficial driver
ODBC

inofficial driver

ADO.NET
GeoSPARQL
HTTP API
JDBC
Jena RDF API
ODBC
OLE DB
RDF4J API
RESTful HTTP API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SOAP webservices
SPARQL 1.1
WebDAV
XPath
XQuery
XSLT

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C#
C++
F#
Visual Basic

Actionscript
Ada
Basic
C
C#
C++
D
Delphi
Forth
Fortran
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Lua
MatLab
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
PL/SQL
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Scheme
Smalltalk
Tcl

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

Virtuoso PL

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

Chain, star, and bi-directional replication
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

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

yes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

via file-system locks

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

optional: either by committing a write-ahead log (WAL) to the local persistent storage or by dumping the memory to a persistent storage

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

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Fine-grained Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) in addition to typical coarse-grained Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) according to SQL-standard. Pluggable authentication with supported standards (LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos)

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Virtuoso is a modern multi-model RDBMS for managing data represented as tabular relations...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Performance & Scale — as exemplified by DBpedia and the LOD Cloud it spawned, i.e.,...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Used for — Analytics/BI Conceptual Data Virtualization Enterprise Knowledge Graphs...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Broad use across enterprises and governments including — European Union (EU) US Government...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Largest installed-base of Multi-Model RDBMS for AI-friendly Knowledge Graphs Platform...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Available in both Commercial Enterprise and Open Source (GPL v2) Editions Feature...
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