DBMS > Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Postgres-XL vs. RavenDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Bigtable vs. Postgres-XL vs. RavenDB

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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

Google's NoSQL Big Data database service. It's the same database that powers many core Google services, including Search, Analytics, Maps, and Gmail.

Based on PostgreSQL enhanced with MPP and write-scale-out cluster features

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Primary database model

Wide column store

Key-value store
Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Document store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Spatial DBMS

Graph DBMS
Spatial 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	3.26
Rank	#92	Overall
	#13	Key-value stores
	#8	Wide column stores

Score	0.49
Rank	#256	Overall
	#117	Relational DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

cloud.google.com/bigtable

www.postgres-xl.org

ravendb.net

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs

www.postgres-xl.org/documentation

ravendb.net/docs

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

Hibernating Rhinos

Initial release

2008

2015

2014

since 2012, originally named StormDB

2010

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

10 R1, October 2018

5.4, July 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Mozilla public license

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

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

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
macOS

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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.

yes

XML type, but no XML query functionality

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

distributed, parallel query execution

SQL-like query language (RQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
HappyBase (Python library)
HBase compatible API (Java)

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

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Erlang
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Perl
PHP
Python
Tcl

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

horizontal partitioning

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Internal replication in Colossus, and regional replication between two clusters in different zones

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

Immediate consistency (for a single cluster), Eventual consistency (for two or more replicated clusters)

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.

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

Atomic single-row operations

ACID

MVCC

ACID, Cluster-wide transaction available

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.

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users, groups and roles based on Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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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