DBMS > Cassandra vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Newts vs. Riak TS vs. ScyllaDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. IBM Cloudant vs. Newts vs. Riak TS vs. ScyllaDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Database as a Service offering based on Apache CouchDB

Time Series DBMS based on Cassandra

Riak TS is a distributed NoSQL database optimized for time series data and based on Riak KV

Cassandra and DynamoDB compatible wide column store

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Key-value store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	2.68
Rank	#106	Overall
	#20	Document stores

Score	0.00
Rank	#383	Overall
	#41	Time Series DBMS

Score	0.20
Rank	#319	Overall
	#27	Time Series DBMS

Score	4.75
Rank	#68	Overall
	#5	Wide column stores

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.ibm.com/products/cloudant

opennms.github.io/newts

www.scylladb.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant

github.com/OpenNMS/newts/wiki

www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/riak/ts/latest

docs.scylladb.com

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

IBM, Apache Software Foundation

IBM acquired Cloudant in February 2014

OpenNMS Group

Open Source, formerly Basho Technologies

ScyllaDB

Initial release

2008

2010

2014

2015

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

3.0.0, September 2022

ScyllaDB Open Source 5.4.1, January 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Open Source (AGPL), commercial license available

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.

Scylla Cloud: Create real-time applications that run at global scale with Scylla Cloud, the industry’s most powerful NoSQL DBaaS

Implementation language

Java

Erlang

Java

Erlang

C++

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

Linux
OS X
Windows

Linux
OS X

Linux

Data scheme

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.

Secondary indexes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

restricted

yes

cluster global secondary indices

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes, limited

SQL-like DML and DDL statements (CQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

RESTful HTTP/JSON API

HTTP REST
Java API

HTTP API
Native Erlang Interface

Proprietary protocol (CQL)

compatible with CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
RESTful HTTP API (DynamoDB compatible)
Thrift

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

C#
Java
JavaScript
Objective-C
PHP
Ruby

Java

unofficial client library
C#
C++

unofficial client library
Clojure

unofficial client library
Dart

unofficial client library
Erlang
Go

unofficial client library
Groovy

unofficial client library
Haskell

unofficial client library
Java
JavaScript

unofficial client library
Lisp

unofficial client library
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

unofficial client library
Smalltalk

unofficial client library

For CQL interface: C#, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala
For DynamoDB interface: .Net, ColdFusion, Erlang, Groovy, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

View functions (Map-Reduce) in JavaScript

Erlang

yes, Lua

Triggers

yes

pre-commit hooks and post-commit hooks

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

based on Cassandra

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

selectable replication factor

based on Cassandra

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

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

Eventual Consistency

based on Cassandra
Immediate Consistency

based on Cassandra

Eventual Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Tunable Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

links between datasets can be stored

Transaction concepts

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

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

atomic operations within a document possible

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Optimistic locking

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 tables

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users can be defined per object

Access rights for users can be defined per database

Access rights for users can be defined per object

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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ScyllaDB is engineered to deliver predictable performance at scale. It’s adopted...
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Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Highly-performant (efficiently utilizes full resources of a node and network; millions...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
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ScyllaDB is ideal for applications that require high throughput and low latency at...
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Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
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Discord, Epic Games, Expedia, Zillow, Comcast, Disney+ Hotstar, Samsung, ShareChat,...
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Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
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ScyllaDB typically offers ~75% total cost of ownership savings, with ~5X higher throughput...
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Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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ScyllaDB Open Source - free open source software (AGPL) ScyllaDB Enterprise - subscription-based...
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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.