DBMS > Cassandra vs. GraphDB vs. MaxDB vs. RavenDB vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. GraphDB vs. MaxDB vs. RavenDB vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Enterprise-ready RDF and graph database with efficient reasoning, cluster and external index synchronization support. It supports also SQL JDBC access to Knowledge Graph and GraphQL over SPARQL.

A robust and reliable RDBMS optimized to run all major SAP solutions

Open Source Operational and Transactional Enterprise NoSQL Document Database

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Graph DBMS
Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	3.25
Rank	#91	Overall
	#7	Graph DBMS
	#4	RDF stores

Score	2.26
Rank	#114	Overall
	#55	Relational DBMS

Score	2.84
Rank	#101	Overall
	#18	Document stores

Score	18.04
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation

maxdb.sap.com/documentation

ravendb.net/docs

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Social network pages

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Ontotext

SAP, acquired from Software AG (Adabas-D) in 1997

Hibernating Rhinos

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2008

2000

1984

2010

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

10.4, October 2023

7.9.10.12, February 2024

5.4, July 2022

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Some plugins of GraphDB Workbench are open sourced

commercial

Limited community edition free

Open Source

AGPL version 3, commercial license available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

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

C++

Scala

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

All OS with a Java VM
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

Linux
macOS
Raspberry Pi
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

schema-free and OWL/RDFS-schema support; RDF shapes

yes

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes, supports real-time synchronization and indexing in SOLR/Elastic search/Lucene and GeoSPARQL geometry data indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

stored SPARQL accessed as SQL using Apache Calcite through JDBC/ODBC

yes

SQL-like query language (RQL)

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

GeoSPARQL
GraphQL
GraphQL Federation
Java API
JDBC
RDF4J API
RDFS
RIO
Sail API
Sesame REST HTTP Protocol
SPARQL 1.1

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
WebDAV

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

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C#
Clojure
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C#
Java
Perl
PHP
Python

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

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

well-defined plugin interfaces; JavaScript server-side extensibility

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

Sharding

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication

Multi-source replication

none

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, Eventual consistency (configurable in cluster mode per master or individual client request)

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

Constraint checking

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

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

Default Basic authentication through RDF4J client, or via Java when run with cURL, default token-based in the Workbench or via Rest API, optional access through OpenID or Kerberos single sign-on.

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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Ontotext GraphDB is a semantic database engine that allows organizations to build...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
» more

GraphDB allows you to link text and data in big knowledge graphs. It’s easy to experiment...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Metadata enrichment and management, linked data publishing, semantic inferencing...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

GraphDB provides a platform for building next-generation AI and Knowledge Graph...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

GraphDB is the most utilized semantic triplestore for mission-critical enterprise...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

GraphDB Free is a non-commercial version and is free to use. GraphDB Enterprise edition...
» more

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