DBMS > Cassandra vs. GigaSpaces vs. Infobright vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. GigaSpaces vs. Infobright vs. Snowflake

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

High performance in-memory data grid platform, powering three products: Smart Cache, Smart ODS (Operational Data Store), Smart Augmented Transactions

High performant column-oriented DBMS for analytic workloads using MySQL or PostgreSQL as a frontend

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Object oriented DBMS

Values are user defined objects

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Graph DBMS
Search engine

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.97
Rank	#192	Overall
	#32	Document stores
	#6	Object oriented DBMS

Score	0.96
Rank	#194	Overall
	#91	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.gigaspaces.com

ignitetech.com/softwarelibrary/infobrightdb

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.gigaspaces.com/latest/landing.html

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Gigaspaces Technologies

Ignite Technologies Inc.; formerly InfoBright Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2000

2005

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

15.5, September 2020

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; Commercial licenses available

commercial

The open source (GPLv2) version did not support inserts/updates/deletes and was discontinued with July 2016

commercial

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

Java, C++, .Net

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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.

XML can be used for describing objects metadata

yes

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

Knowledge Grid Technology used instead

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-99 for query and DML statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

GigaSpaces LRMI
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
JPA
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C++
Java
Python
Scala

.Net
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Haskell
Java
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, event driven architecture

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

synchronous or asynchronous
Source-replica replication

synchronous or asynchronous

Source-replica replication

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Map-Reduce pattern can be built with XAP task executors

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Immediate Consistency

Consistency level configurable: ALL, QUORUM, ANY

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

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

Role-based access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

exploiting MySQL or PostgreSQL frontend capabilities

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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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