DBMS > Cassandra vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. GridDB vs. Quasardb

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. FoundationDB vs. Google Cloud Firestore vs. GridDB vs. Quasardb

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market. As a consequence, the product was removed from the DB-Engines ranking. In April 2018, Apple open-sourced FoundationDB and it therefore reappears in the ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Ordered key-value store. Core features are complimented by layers.

Cloud Firestore is an auto-scaling document database for storing, syncing, and querying data for mobile and web apps. It offers seamless integration with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products.

Scalable in-memory time series database optimized for IoT and Big Data

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Document store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.06
Rank	#185	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#85	Relational DBMS

Score	7.36
Rank	#53	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	2.09
Rank	#120	Overall
	#10	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.21
Rank	#322	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/products/firestore

griddb.net

quasar.ai

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

apple.github.io/foundationdb

firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

docs.griddb.net

doc.quasar.ai/master

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

FoundationDB

Google

Toshiba Corporation

quasardb

Initial release

2008

2013

2017

2013

2009

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

5.1, August 2022

3.14.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3 and Apache License, version 2.0 , commercial license (standard and advanced editions) also available

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

yes

numerical, string, blob, geometry, boolean, timestamp

yes

integer and binary

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

with tags

SQL

Support of SQL

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

SQL92, SQL-like TQL (Toshiba Query Language)

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Android
gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP API

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
PHP
Python
Ruby
Swift

Go
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
Python

C
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
R

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes, Firebase Rules & Cloud Functions

Triggers

yes

yes, with Cloud Functions

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

consistent hashing

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Using Cloud Dataflow

Connector for using GridDB as an input source and output destination for Hadoop MapReduce jobs

with Hadoop integration

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Immediate consistency within container, eventual consistency across containers

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

yes

ACID at container level

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management. Security Rules for 3rd party authentication using Firebase Auth.

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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GridDB is a highly scalable, in-memory time series database optimized for IoT and...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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1. Optimized for IoT Equipped with Toshiba's proprietary key-container data model...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Factory IoT, Automative Industry, Energy, BEMS, Smart Community, Monitoring system.
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Denso International [see use case ] An Electric Power company [see use case ] Ishinomaki...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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GitHub trending repository
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Open Source license (AGPL v3 & Apache v2) Commercial license (subscription)
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