DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Hazelcast vs. Sqrrl vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Hazelcast vs. Sqrrl vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Sqrrl has been acquired by Amazon and became a part of Amazon Web Services. It has been removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

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

A widely adopted in-memory data grid

Adaptable, secure NoSQL built on Apache Accumulo

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store

JSON support with IMDG 3.12

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	5.97
Rank	#57	Overall
	#6	Key-value stores

Score	1.73
Rank	#143	Overall
	#5	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

hazelcast.com

sqrrl.com

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hazelcast.org/imdg/docs

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Hazelcast

Amazon

originally Sqrrl Data, Inc.

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2008

2012

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

5.3.6, November 2023

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available

commercial

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

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

All OS with a Java VM

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

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

the object must implement a serialization strategy

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

yes

SQL-like query language

GraphQL is used as query language

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

JCache
JPA
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

Accumulo Shell
Java API
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Thrift

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

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

.Net
C#
C++
Clojure
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Scala

Actionscript
C

using GLib
C#
C++
Cocoa
Delphi
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Smalltalk

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Event Listeners, Executor Services

Triggers

yes

Events

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

making use of Hadoop

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

yes

Replicated Map

selectable replication factor

making use of Hadoop

yes

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 or Eventual Consistency selectable by user

Raft Consensus Algorithm

Immediate Consistency

Document store kept consistent with combination of global timestamping, row-level transactions, and server-side consistency resolution.

Eventual 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

ACID

one or two-phase-commit; repeatable reads; read commited

Atomic updates per row, document, or graph entity

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.

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Users with fine-grained authorization concept

Role-based access control

Cell-level Security, Data-Centric Security, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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