DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. HBase vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Microsoft Azure AI Search

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.

Wide-column store based on Apache Hadoop and on concepts of BigTable

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Vector 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	30.50
Rank	#26	Overall
	#2	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	5.59
Rank	#63	Overall
	#7	Search engines

Website

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

hbase.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

hbase.apache.org/book.html

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top-level project, originally developed by Powerset

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2012

2008

2010

2015

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.3.4, January 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

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

Erlang

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
Unix
Windows

using Cygwin

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free, schema definition possible

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

options to bring your own types, AVRO

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.

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)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

C
C#
C++
Groovy
Java
PHP
Python
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

C#
Java
JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

Coprocessors in Java

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

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"

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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 or Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency

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

Single row ACID (across millions of columns)

atomic operations within a document possible

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

Access Control Lists (ACL) for RBAC, integration with Apache Ranger for RBAC & ABAC

Access rights for users can be defined per database

yes

using Azure authentication

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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