DBMS > Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Newts vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Firebird vs. Newts vs. RDF4J vs. Sphinx

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

Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra

RDF4J is a Java framework for processing RDF data, supporting both memory-based and a disk-based storage.

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

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	103.86
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	21.06
Rank	#31	Overall
	#19	Relational DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#396	Overall
	#42	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.71
Rank	#231	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	6.03
Rank	#60	Overall
	#6	Search engines

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.firebirdsql.org

opennms.github.io/newts

rdf4j.org

sphinxsearch.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.firebirdsql.org/en/reference-manuals

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

rdf4j.org/documentation

sphinxsearch.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Firebird Foundation

OpenNMS Group

Since 2016 officially forked into an Eclipse project, former developer was Aduna Software.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

Initial release

2008

2000

As fork of Borland's InterBase

2014

2004

2001

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.0.0, January 2024

3.5.1, February 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Initial Developer's Public License

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

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

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
server-less

Firebird Embedded Server
Solaris
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

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 REST
Java API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

Proprietary protocol

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

Java

Java
PHP
Python

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

PSQL

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

based on Cassandra

none

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

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

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

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

Isolation support depends on the API used

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 storage is supported as well

yes

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

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

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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