DBMS > Cassandra vs. GeoMesa vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. RDF4J vs. Stardog

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. GeoMesa vs. IBM Db2 Event Store vs. RDF4J vs. Stardog

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

GeoMesa is a distributed spatio-temporal DBMS based on various systems as storage layer.

Distributed Event Store optimized for Internet of Things use cases

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

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Spatial DBMS

Event Store
Time Series DBMS

RDF store

Graph DBMS
RDF store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.78
Rank	#213	Overall
	#4	Spatial DBMS

Score	0.19
Rank	#323	Overall
	#2	Event Stores
	#28	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#230	Overall
	#9	RDF stores

Score	2.02
Rank	#123	Overall
	#11	Graph DBMS
	#6	RDF stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.geomesa.org

www.ibm.com/products/db2-event-store

rdf4j.org

www.stardog.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.geomesa.org/documentation/stable/user/index.html

www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2-event-store

rdf4j.org/documentation

docs.stardog.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

CCRi and others

IBM

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

Stardog-Union

Initial release

2008

2014

2017

2004

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

4.0.5, February 2024

2.0

7.3.0, May 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache License 2.0

commercial

free developer edition available

Open Source

Eclipse Distribution License (EDL), v1.0.

commercial

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

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

Scala

C and C++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux, macOS, Windows for the developer addition

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

RDF Schemas

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support

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

supports real-time indexing in full-text and geospatial

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

through the embedded Spark runtime

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
DB2 Connect
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

Java API
RIO

RDF Input/Output
Sail API
SeRQL

Sesame RDF Query Language
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C
C#
C++
Cobol
Delphi
Fortran
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scala
Visual Basic

Java
PHP
Python

.Net
Clojure
Groovy
Java
JavaScript
Python
Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions and aggregates, HTTP Server extensions in Java

Triggers

yes

via event handlers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

depending on storage layer

Sharding

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

depending on storage layer

Active-active shard replication

none

Multi-source replication in HA-Cluster

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

depending on storage layer

Eventual Consistency

Immediate Consistency in HA-Cluster

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

relationships in graphs

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

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

No - written data is immutable

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

Yes - Synchronous writes to local disk combined with replication and asynchronous writes in parquet format to permanent shared storage

yes

in-memory storage is supported as well

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

depending on storage layer

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes

depending on the DBMS used for storage

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles

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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