DBMS > Cassandra vs. eXtremeDB vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Memcached vs. TimescaleDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. eXtremeDB vs. Hawkular Metrics vs. Memcached vs. TimescaleDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Natively in-memory DBMS with options for persistency, high-availability and clustering

Hawkular metrics is the metric storage of the Red Hat sponsored Hawkular monitoring system. It is based on Cassandra.

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

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

Primary database model

Wide column store

Relational DBMS
Time Series DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

Time Series DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

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	0.74
Rank	#223	Overall
	#103	Relational DBMS
	#18	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.00
Rank	#379	Overall
	#40	Time Series DBMS

Score	19.42
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	4.64
Rank	#71	Overall
	#4	Time Series DBMS

Website

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

www.mcobject.com/docs/extremedb.htm

www.hawkular.org/hawkular-metrics/docs/user-guide

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

docs.timescale.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

McObject

Community supported by Red Hat

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Timescale

Initial release

2008

2001

2014

2003

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

8.2, 2021

1.6.25, March 2024

2.13.0, November 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

BSD license

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 and C++

Java

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
macOS
Solaris
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

schema-free

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.

support of XML interfaces available

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

with the option: eXtremeSQL

yes

full PostgreSQL SQL syntax

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

.NET Client API
JDBC
JNI
ODBC
Proprietary protocol
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP REST

Proprietary protocol

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

.Net
C
C#
C++
Java
Lua
Python
Scala

Go
Java
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

.Net
C
C++
Delphi
Java

JDBC
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
R
Ruby
Scheme
Tcl

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

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

by defining events

yes

via Hawkular Alerting

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

horizontal partitioning / sharding

Sharding

based on Cassandra

none

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

Active Replication Fabric™ for IoT
Multi-source replication

by means of eXtremeDB Cluster option
Source-replica replication

by means of eXtremeDB High Availability option

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

Source-replica replication with hot standby and reads on replicas

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

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

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

Optimistic (MVCC) and pessimistic (locking) strategies available

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

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

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...
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eXtremeDB is an in-memory and/or persistent database system that offers an ultra-small...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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eXtremeDB databases can be modeled relationally or as objects and can utilize SQL...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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IoT application across all markets: Industrial Control, Netcom, Telecom, Defense,...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Schneider Electronics, F5 Networks, TNS, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, GoPro, ViaSat,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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With hundreds of customers and over 30 million devices/applications using the product...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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For server use cases, there is a simple per-server license irrespective of the number...
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