DBMS > Cassandra vs. GridGain vs. MariaDB vs. NuoDB vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. GridGain vs. MariaDB vs. NuoDB vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

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

MySQL application compatible open source RDBMS, enhanced with high availability, security, interoperability and performance capabilities. MariaDB ColumnStore provides a column-oriented storage engine and MariaDB Xpand supports distributed SQL.

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

A time series DBMS optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, based on PostgreSQL

Primary database model

Wide column store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Graph DBMS

with OQGraph storage engine
Spatial DBMS

Relational DBMS

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

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

Score	93.21
Rank	#13	Overall
	#9	Relational DBMS

Score	0.89
Rank	#198	Overall
	#92	Relational DBMS

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.gridgain.com

mariadb.com

Site of MariaDB Corporation
mariadb.org

Site of MariaDB Foundation

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

www.timescale.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

mariadb.com/kb/en/library

doc.nuodb.com

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

GridGain Systems, Inc.

MariaDB Corporation Ab (MariaDB Enterprise),
MariaDB Foundation (community MariaDB Server)

The lead developer Monty Widenius is the original author of MySQL

Dassault Systèmes

originally NuoDB, Inc.

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2007

2009

Fork of MySQL, which was first released in 1995

2013

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

GridGain 8.5.1

11.3.2, February 2024

2.15.0, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial enterprise subscription available

commercial

limited edition free

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.

STACKIT MariaDB offers MariaDB in a fully managed version in enterprise grade, 100% GDPR-compliant.

Implementation language

Java

Java, C++, .Net

C and C++

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Windows

ColumnStore storage engine not available on Windows

hosted

Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, SoftLayer
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

Dynamic columns are supported

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

numerics, strings, booleans, arrays, JSON blobs, geospatial dimensions, currencies, binary data, other complex data types

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)

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

yes

with proprietary extensions

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
Proprietary native API

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC

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

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
C++
Java
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Ada
C
C#
C++
D
Eiffel
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Objective-C
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

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

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

yes

PL/SQL compatibility added with version 10.3

Java, SQL

user defined functions, PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Java, PL/PHP, PL/R, PL/Ruby, PL/Scheme, PL/Unix shell

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

several options for horizontal partitioning and Sharding

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

yes, across time and space (hash partitioning) attributes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes (replicated cache)

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes

Managed transparently by NuoDB

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

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

not for MyISAM storage engine

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

not for MyISAM storage engine

ACID

tunable commit protocol

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

MVCC

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

not for in-memory storage engine

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

with MEMORY storage engine

yes

Temporary table

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Security Hooks for custom implementations

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Standard SQL roles/ privileges, Administrative Users

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...
» more

MariaDB is the most powerful open source relational database – modern SQL and JSON...
» more

Competitive advantages

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

MariaDB Servers have many features unavailable in other open source relational databases....
» more

Typical application scenarios

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

Web, SaaS and Cloud operational applications that require high availability, scalability...
» more

Key customers

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

Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens Featured...
» more

Market metrics

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

MariaDB is the default database in the LAMP stack supplied by Red Hat and SUSE Linux,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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

MariaDB plc subscriptions cover our free, open source database, Community Server,...
» more

We invite representatives of system vendors to contact us for updating and extending the system information,
and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.