DBMS > Cassandra vs. etcd vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. etcd vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Snowflake vs. SwayDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A high performance, column-oriented RDBMS, specifically developed to harness the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware

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

An embeddable, non-blocking, type-safe key-value store for single or multiple disks and in-memory storage

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

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

Score	98.83
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	7.03
Rank	#54	Overall
	#5	Key-value stores

Score	1.64
Rank	#145	Overall
	#67	Relational DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	0.04
Rank	#387	Overall
	#61	Key-value stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

etcd.io
github.com/etcd-io/etcd

github.com/heavyai/heavydb
www.heavy.ai

www.snowflake.com

swaydb.simer.au

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

etcd.io/docs
github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/Documentation

docs.heavy.ai

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Simer Plaha

Initial release

2008

2016

2014

2018

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.4, August 2019

5.10, January 2022

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

commercial

Open Source

GNU Affero GPL V3.0

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

C++ and CUDA

Scala

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
Windows

experimental

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

schema-free

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

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

gRPC
JSON over HTTP

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Java
Kotlin
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

yes, watching key changes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Round robin

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Using Raft consensus algorithm to ensure data replication with strong consistency among multiple replicas.

Multi-source replication

yes

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

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

Atomic execution of operations

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

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

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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