DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. Oracle vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. Oracle vs. SAP SQL Anywhere

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.

Distributed Event Store optimized for Internet of Things use cases

Widely used RDBMS

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

Event Store
Time Series DBMS

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
RDF store

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Spatial DBMS

with Oracle Spatial and Graph
Vector DBMS

since Oracle 23

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	0.19
Rank	#323	Overall
	#2	Event Stores
	#28	Time Series DBMS

Score	1236.29
Rank	#1	Overall
	#1	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.ibm.com/products/db2-event-store

www.oracle.com/database

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-event-store

docs.oracle.com/en/database

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

IBM

Oracle

SAP

formerly Sybase

Initial release

2008

2012

2017

1980

1992

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.0

23c, September 2023

17, July 2015

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

free developer edition available

commercial

restricted free version is 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

C and C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

Linux, macOS, Windows for the developer addition

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows
z/OS

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Schemaless in JSON and XML columns

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)

yes

through the embedded Spark runtime

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

ADO.NET
DB2 Connect
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

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++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Clojure
Cobol
Delphi
Eiffel
Erlang
Fortran
Groovy
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
Lisp
Objective C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Tcl
Visual Basic

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

limited functionality with using 'rules'

yes

PL/SQL

also stored procedures in Java possible

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

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

Sharding, horizontal partitioning

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Active-active shard replication

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

can be realized in PL/SQL

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

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

isolation level can be parameterized

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

No - written data is immutable

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes - Synchronous writes to local disk combined with replication and asynchronous writes in parquet format to permanent shared storage

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Version 12c introduced the new option 'Oracle Database In-Memory'

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

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...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

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...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.