DBMS > Cassandra vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. RavenDB vs. SWC-DB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. FoundationDB vs. Interbase vs. RavenDB vs. SWC-DB

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Created as commercial project in 2013, FoundationDB has been acquired by Apple in March 2015 and was withdrawn from the market.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.

Light-weight proven RDBMS

originally from Borland

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

A high performance, scalable Wide Column DBMS

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store

supported via specific layer
Key-value store
Relational DBMS

supported via specific SQL-layer

Relational DBMS

Document store

Wide column store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Time Series DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.03
Rank	#190	Overall
	#31	Document stores
	#28	Key-value stores
	#89	Relational DBMS

Score	4.61
Rank	#72	Overall
	#39	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	0.01
Rank	#376	Overall
	#13	Wide column stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/apple/foundationdb

www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

ravendb.net

github.com/kashirin-alex/swc-db
www.swcdb.org

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

apple.github.io/foundationdb

docs.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

ravendb.net/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

FoundationDB

Embarcadero

Hibernating Rhinos

Alex Kashirin

Initial release

2008

2013

1984

2010

2020

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

6.2.28, November 2020

InterBase 2020, December 2019

5.4, July 2022

0.5, April 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

GPL V3

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++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Android
iOS
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

some layers support schemas

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

some layers support typing

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.

export as XML data possible

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

supported in specific SQL layer only

yes

SQL-like query language (RQL)

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

.NET Client API
F# Client API
Go Client API
Java Client API
NodeJS Client API
PHP Client API
Python Client API
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol
Thrift

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java
Object Pascal
PHP
Ruby

.Net
C#
F#
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

in SQL-layer only

yes

Interbase procedure and trigger language

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Interbase Change Views

Multi-source replication

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

Linearizable consistency

Immediate Consistency

Default ACID transactions on the local node (eventually consistent across the cluster). Atomic operations with cluster-wide ACID transactions. Eventual consistency for indexes and full-text search indexes.

Immediate Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

in SQL-layer only

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Multiversion concurreny control

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

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Authorization levels configured per client per database

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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