DBMS > Cassandra vs. Heroic vs. Quasardb vs. Titan vs. YugabyteDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. Heroic vs. Quasardb vs. Titan vs. YugabyteDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Titan has been decommisioned after the takeover by Datastax. It will be removed from the DB-Engines ranking. A fork has been open-sourced as JanusGraph.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Time Series DBMS built at Spotify based on Cassandra or Google Cloud Bigtable, and ElasticSearch

Distributed, high-performance timeseries database

Titan is a Graph DBMS optimized for distributed clusters.

High-performance distributed SQL database for global, internet-scale applications. Wire and feature compatible with PostgreSQL.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
Wide column store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	0.51
Rank	#255	Overall
	#21	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.14
Rank	#332	Overall
	#29	Time Series DBMS

Score	2.91
Rank	#102	Overall
	#51	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

github.com/spotify/heroic

quasar.ai

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan

www.yugabyte.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

spotify.github.io/heroic

doc.quasar.ai/master

github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki

docs.yugabyte.com
github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Spotify

quasardb

Aurelius, owned by DataStax

Yugabyte Inc.

Initial release

2008

2014

2009

2012

2017

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.14.1, January 2024

2.19, September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Free community edition, Non-profit organizations and non-commercial usage are eligible for free licenses

Open Source

Apache license, version 2.0

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.

YugabyteDB Managed is the fully managed database-as-a-service offering of YugabyteDB. Get started quickly, and effortlessly ensure continuous availability and limitless scale of your cloud native applications.

Implementation language

Java

C++

Java

C and C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

depending on used data model

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

integer and binary

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

via Elasticsearch

yes

with tags

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

SQL-like query language

yes, PostgreSQL compatible

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

HQL (Heroic Query Language, a JSON-based language)
HTTP API

HTTP API

Java API
TinkerPop Blueprints
TinkerPop Frames
TinkerPop Gremlin
TinkerPop Rexster

JDBC
YCQL, an SQL-based flexible-schema API with its roots in Cassandra Query Language
YSQL - a fully relational SQL API that is wire compatible with the SQL language in PostgreSQL

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

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

Clojure
Java
Python

C
C#
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
PHP
Python
Ruby
Rust
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

sql, plpgsql, C

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

consistent hashing

yes

via pluggable storage backends

Hash and Range Sharding, row-level geo-partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

yes

Source-replica replication with selectable replication factor

yes

Based on Raft distributed consensus protocol, minimum 3 replicas for continuous availability

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

with Hadoop integration

yes

via Faunus, a graph analytics engine

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

Strong consistency on writes and tunable consistency on reads

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Relationships in graph

yes

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

ACID

Distributed ACID with Serializable & Snapshot Isolation. Inspired by Google Spanner architecture.

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by using LevelDB

yes

Supports various storage backends: Cassandra, HBase, Berkeley DB, Akiban, Hazelcast

yes

based on RocksDB

In-memory capabilities

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

yes

Transient mode

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Cryptographically strong user authentication and audit trail

User authentification and security via Rexster Graph Server

yes

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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YugabyteDB is an open source distributed SQL database for cloud native transactional...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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PostgreSQL compatible: Get instantly productive with a PostgreSQL compatible RDBMS....
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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Systems of record and engagement for cloud native applications that require resilience,...
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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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2 Million+ lifetime clusters deployed, 6.5K+ GitHub stars, 7K YugabyteDB Community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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Apache 2.0 license for the database
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