DBMS > Cassandra vs. GridGain vs. Realm vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. GridGain vs. Realm vs. SAP IQ vs. Snowflake

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

A DBMS built for use on mobile devices that’s a fast, easy to use alternative to SQLite and Core Data

Columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

Primary database model

Wide column store

Key-value store
Relational DBMS

Document store

Relational DBMS

column-oriented

Relational DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	7.60
Rank	#52	Overall
	#9	Document stores

Score	2.75
Rank	#104	Overall
	#53	Relational DBMS

Score	121.33
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.gridgain.com

realm.io

www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/sybase-iq-big-data-management.html

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.gridgain.com/docs/index.html

realm.io/docs

help.sap.com/docs/SAP_IQ

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

GridGain Systems, Inc.

Realm, acquired by MongoDB in May 2019

SAP, formerly Sybase

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2007

2014

1994

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

GridGain 8.5.1

16.1 SPS04, April 2019

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

commercial

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

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Android
Backend: server-less
iOS
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
Solaris
Windows

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

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)

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

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

ADO.NET
JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

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

.Net
Java

with Android only
Objective-C
React Native
Swift

C
C#
C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

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

runs within the applications so server-side scripts are unnecessary

yes

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes (cache interceptors and events)

yes

Change Listeners

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

none

shared disk or shared nothing architectures with SAP IQ Multiplexer

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes (replicated cache)

none

SAP/Sybase Replication Server

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

yes (compute grid and hadoop accelerator)

Hadoop integration

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

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

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.

yes

In-Memory realm

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Security Hooks for custom implementations

yes

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

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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