DBMS > Cassandra vs. Google BigQuery vs. H2 vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Google BigQuery vs. H2 vs. SAP SQL Anywhere vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Large scale data warehouse service with append-only tables

Full-featured RDBMS with a small footprint, either embedded into a Java application or used as a database server.

RDBMS database and synchronization technologies for server, desktop, remote office, and mobile environments

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	60.38
Rank	#19	Overall
	#13	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	4.25
Rank	#79	Overall
	#43	Relational DBMS

Score	0.11
Rank	#343	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

cloud.google.com/bigquery

www.h2database.com

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sql-anywhere.html

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SQL_Anywhere

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

Thomas Mueller

SAP

formerly Sybase

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

2008

2010

2005

1992

2019

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2.2.220, July 2023

17, July 2015

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

dual-licence (Mozilla public license, Eclipse public license)

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

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

Clojure

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

All OS with a Java VM

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

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

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)

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
HTTP API
JDBC
ODBC

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java

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

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

in JavaScript

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

yes, in C/C++, Java, .Net or Perl

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

With clustering: 2 database servers on different computers operate on identical copies of a database

Source-replica replication

Database mirroring

yes, each node contains all data

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

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

Since BigQuery is designed for querying data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

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 privileges (owner, writer, reader) on dataset, table or view level

Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

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.
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Licensing and pricing models

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