DBMS > Apache Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Heroic vs. Stardog vs. Titan

System Properties Comparison Apache Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Heroic vs. Stardog vs. Titan

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph.

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

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform and graph DBMS with high availability, high performance reasoning, and virtualization

Titan is a Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	98.94
Rank	#11	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	19.46
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	0.13
Rank	#335	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	1.93
Rank	#121	Overall
	#10	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

www.stardog.com

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

spotify.github.io/heroic

docs.stardog.com

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Spotify

Stardog-Union

Aurelius, owned by DataStax

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

2010

2012

Current release

5.0-rc1, July 2024

5.0.1, August 2024

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

60-day fully-featured trial license; 1-year fully-featured non-commercial use license for academics/students

Open Source

Apache license, version 2.0

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
macOS
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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.

Import/export of XML data possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

via Elasticsearch

yes

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

Yes, compatible with all major SQL variants through dedicated BI/SQL Server

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

GraphQL query language
HTTP API
Jena RDF API
OWL
RDF4J API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SNARL
SPARQL
Spring Data
Stardog Studio
TinkerPop 3

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

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
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Clojure
Java
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

yes

Triggers

yes

via event handlers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

none

yes

via pluggable storage backends

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

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

yes

Relationships in graph

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

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

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

Access rights for users and roles

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

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

Apache 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

News

How to Monitor DataStax-Powered RAG Applications with Fiddler
19 September 2024

How Knowledge Graph RAG Boosts LLM Results
18 September 2024

How to Chunk Text in JavaScript for Your RAG Application
18 September 2024

Precision and Efficiency in Domain-Specific Text2SQL Conversion: Introducing Skypoint AI Platform’s SherloQ
11 September 2024

Now in LangChain: Graph Vector Store, a Simple Way to Add Structured Data to RAG Applications
11 September 2024

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.