DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Greenplum vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. mSQL

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Greenplum vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. mSQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Firebird is an open source RDBMS forked from Borland's InterBase

Analytic Database platform built on PostgreSQL. Full name is Pivotal Greenplum Database

A logical database in Greenplum is an array of individual PostgreSQL databases working together to present a single database image.

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

mSQL (Mini SQL) is a simple and lightweight RDBMS

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
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	20.82
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	8.37
Rank	#48	Overall
	#30	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#379	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.27
Rank	#167	Overall
	#77	Relational DBMS

Website

hughestech.com.au/products/msql

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

docs.greenplum.org

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Pivotal Software Inc.

Community supported by Red Hat

Hughes Technologies

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2005

2014

1994

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

7.0.0, September 2023

4.4, October 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

free licenses can be provided

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

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

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

since Version 4.2

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

A subset of ANSI SQL is implemented

no subqueries, aggregate functions, views, foreign keys, triggers

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
C/C++ API
JDBC

Jaybird
ODBC
OLE DB

JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Delphi
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Lua
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

C
C++
Delphi
Java
Perl
PHP
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Triggers

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

none

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

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

none

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Features a multi-generational MVCC architecture, readers do not block writers

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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