DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. HyperSQL vs. Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB vs. Milvus

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

Multithreaded, transactional RDBMS written in Java

also known as HSQLDB

Globally distributed, horizontally scalable, multi-model database service

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store
Graph DBMS
Key-value store
Wide column store

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	20.50
Rank	#30	Overall
	#18	Relational DBMS

Score	3.23
Rank	#93	Overall
	#48	Relational DBMS

Score	27.71
Rank	#27	Overall
	#4	Document stores
	#2	Graph DBMS
	#3	Key-value stores
	#3	Wide column stores

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

hsqldb.org

azure.microsoft.com/services/cosmos-db

milvus.io

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

hsqldb.org/web/hsqlDocsFrame.html

learn.microsoft.com/azure/cosmos-db

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

Microsoft

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2001

2014

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

2.7.2, June 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

based on BSD license

commercial

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

Java

C and C++

Java

C++, Go

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

Embedded (into Java applications) and Client-Server operating modes

hosted

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

JSON types

Vector, Numeric and String

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

All properties auto-indexed by default

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like 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

HTTP API

JDBC via HTTP
JDBC
ODBC

DocumentDB API
Graph API (Gremlin)
MongoDB API
RESTful HTTP API
Table API

RESTful HTTP 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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC
Java

.Net
C#
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
MongoDB client drivers written for various programming languages
Python

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

Java, SQL

JavaScript

Triggers

yes

JavaScript

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

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

none

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

Integration with Hadoop/HDInsight on Azure*

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Consistent Prefix
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable on request level
Session Consistency

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable 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

Multi-item ACID transactions with snapshot isolation within a partition

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights can be defined down to the item level

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
» more

Key customers

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

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
» more

News

An Introduction to David Jones-Gilardi, Developer Relations
11 June 2024

Introducing Tejas Kumar, Developer Relations Engineer
7 June 2024

Indexing All of Wikipedia on a Laptop
5 June 2024

An Introduction to Phil Nash, Developer Relations
3 June 2024

Focus on Creativity, Not Clusters: DataStax Mission Control in Action!
30 May 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.