DBMS > Cassandra vs. Geode vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Geode vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Oracle Berkeley DB vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Geode is a distributed data container, pooling memory, CPU, network resources, and optionally local disk across multiple processes

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

Widely used in-process key-value store

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

supports sorted and unsorted key sets
Native XML DBMS

in the Oracle Berkeley DB XML version

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	1.92
Rank	#131	Overall
	#23	Key-value stores

Score	1.77
Rank	#141	Overall
	#65	Relational DBMS

Score	2.21
Rank	#117	Overall
	#20	Key-value stores
	#3	Native XML DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

geode.apache.org

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb.html

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

geode.apache.org/docs

docs.heavy.ai

docs.oracle.com/cd/E17076_05/html/index.html

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Originally developed by Gemstone. They outsourced the project to Apache in 2015 but still deliver a commercial version as Gemfire.

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Oracle

originally developed by Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2002

2016

1994

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.1, February 2017

5.10, January 2022

18.1.40, May 2020

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; commercial licenses available as Gemfire

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

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 CUDA

C, Java, C++ (depending on the Berkeley DB edition)

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

the JDK (8 or later) is also required

Linux

AIX
Android
FreeBSD
iOS
Linux
OS X
Solaris
VxWorks
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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.

yes

only with the Berkeley DB XML edition

yes

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)

SQL-like query language (OQL)

yes

SQL interfaced based on SQLite is available

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

Java Client API
Memcached protocol
RESTful HTTP API

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

ADO.NET
JDBC
native C library
ODBC
streaming API for large objects

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
All JVM based languages
C++
Groovy
Java
Scala

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

.Net

Figaro is a .Net framework assembly that extends Berkeley DB XML into an embeddable database engine for .NET
others

Third-party libraries to manipulate Berkeley DB files are available for many languages
C
C#
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Perl
Python
Tcl

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

Triggers

yes

Cache Event Listeners

yes

only for the SQL API

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Round robin

none

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

Immediate 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

yes, on a single node

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

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

Access rights per client and object definable

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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