DBMS > Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. H2 vs. NuoDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. H2 vs. NuoDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A horizontally scalable, globally consistent, relational database service. It is the externalization of the core Google database that runs the biggest aspects of Google, like Ads and Google Play.

GridGain is an in-memory computing platform, built on Apache Ignite

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

NuoDB is a webscale distributed database that supports SQL and ACID transactions

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

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	2.89
Rank	#103	Overall
	#52	Relational DBMS

Score	1.47
Rank	#154	Overall
	#26	Key-value stores
	#72	Relational DBMS

Score	8.13
Rank	#49	Overall
	#31	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.gridgain.com

www.h2database.com

www.3ds.com/nuodb-distributed-sql-database

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

www.h2database.com/html/main.html

doc.nuodb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Thomas Mueller

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Initial release

2008

2017

2007

2005

2013

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

GridGain 8.5.1

2.2.220, July 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

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

commercial

limited edition free

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

Java

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

All OS with a Java VM

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

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

Query statements complying to ANSI 2011

ANSI-99 for query and DML statements, subset of DDL

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

gRPC (using protocol buffers) API
JDBC

At present, JDBC supports read-only queries. No support for DDL or DML statements.
RESTful HTTP API

HDFS API
Hibernate
JCache
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API
Spring Data

JDBC
ODBC

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes (compute grid and cache interceptors can be used instead)

Java Stored Procedures and User-Defined Functions

Java, SQL

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

data is dynamically stored/cached on the nodes where it is read/written

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication with 3 replicas for regional instances.

yes (replicated cache)

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

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

using Google Cloud Dataflow

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

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

by using interleaved tables, this features focuses more on performance improvements than on 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

Strict serializable isolation

ACID

tunable commit protocol

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

yes, multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)

yes

MVCC

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

Temporary table

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)

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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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