DBMS > Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. InfluxDB vs. LevelDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Google Cloud Spanner vs. GridGain vs. InfluxDB vs. LevelDB

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

DBMS for storing time series, events and metrics

Embeddable fast key-value storage library that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

with GEO package

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	25.83
Rank	#28	Overall
	#1	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.35
Rank	#111	Overall
	#19	Key-value stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

cloud.google.com/spanner

www.gridgain.com

www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb-overview

github.com/google/leveldb

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.google.com/spanner/docs

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

docs.influxdata.com/influxdb

github.com/google/leveldb/blob/main/doc/index.md

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Google

Initial release

2008

2017

2007

2013

2011

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

GridGain 8.5.1

2.7.6, April 2024

1.23, February 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

MIT-License; commercial enterprise version available

Open Source

BSD

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

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X

through Homebrew

Illumos
Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Numeric data and Strings

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

SQL-like query language

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

HTTP API
JSON over UDP

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

.Net
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript
JavaScript (Node.js)
Lisp
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Rust
Scala

C++
Go
Java

3rd party binding
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party binding
Python

3rd party binding

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

in enterprise version only

none

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)

selectable replication factor

in enterprise version only

none

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

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

with automatic compression on writes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Depending on used storage engine

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

simple rights management via user accounts

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB , the open source time series database. It...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Time to Value InfluxDB is available in all the popular languages and frameworks,...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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IoT & Sensor Monitoring Developers are witnessing the instrumentation of every available...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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InfluxData has more than 1,900 paying customers, including customers include MuleSoft,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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Fastest-growing database to drive 27,500 GitHub stars Over 750,000 daily active instances
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Open source core with closed source clustering available either on-premise or on...
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