DBMS > Cassandra vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Hypertable vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. HEAVY.AI vs. Hypertable vs. Kinetica vs. Snowflake

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Hypertable has stopped its further development with March 2016 and is removed from the DB-Engines ranking.

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

An open source BigTable implementation based on distributed file systems such as Hadoop

Fully vectorized database across both GPUs and CPUs

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

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Spatial DBMS

Spatial DBMS
Time Series DBMS

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

Score	103.86
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.10
Rank	#126	Overall
	#61	Relational DBMS

Score	0.69
Rank	#234	Overall
	#107	Relational DBMS

Score	123.20
Rank	#9	Overall
	#6	Relational DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

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

www.kinetica.com

www.snowflake.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.heavy.ai

docs.kinetica.com

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

HEAVY.AI, Inc.

Hypertable Inc.

Kinetica

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Initial release

2008

2016

2009

2012

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

5.10, January 2022

0.9.8.11, March 2016

7.1, August 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

Open Source

Apache Version 2; enterprise edition available

Open Source

GNU version 3. Commercial license available

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

C++ and CUDA

C++

C, C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux

Linux
OS X
Windows

an inofficial Windows port is available

Linux

hosted

Data scheme

schema-free

yes

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

restricted

only exact value or prefix value scans

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

yes

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC
Thrift
Vega

C++ API
Thrift

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

All languages supporting JDBC/ODBC/Thrift
Python

C++
Java
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

user defined functions

Triggers

yes

triggers when inserted values for one or more columns fall within a specified range

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

Sharding

yes

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication

selectable replication factor on file system level

Source-replica replication

yes

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

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

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

GPU vRAM or System RAM

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users and roles on table level

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.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

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