DBMS > Cassandra vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. IRONdb vs. Sphinx vs. TerminusDB

System Properties Comparison Cassandra vs. InterSystems IRIS vs. IRONdb vs. Sphinx vs. TerminusDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

IRONdb seems to be discontinued. Therefore it is excluded from the DB-Engines Ranking.

Description

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

A containerised multi-model DBMS, interoperability and analytics data platform with wide capabilities for vertical and horizontal scalability

A distributed Time Series DBMS with a focus on scalability, fault tolerance and operational simplicity

Open source search engine for searching in data from different sources, e.g. relational databases

Scalable Graph Database platform making enterprise data available by exploiting inferred entities and relationships

Primary database model

Wide column store

Document store
Key-value store
Object oriented DBMS
Relational DBMS

Time Series DBMS

Search engine

Graph DBMS

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

Document store
RDF store

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

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	4.05
Rank	#83	Overall
	#14	Document stores
	#10	Key-value stores
	#1	Object oriented DBMS
	#45	Relational DBMS

Score	5.98
Rank	#56	Overall
	#5	Search engines

Score	0.17
Rank	#325	Overall
	#29	Graph DBMS

Website

cassandra.apache.org

www.intersystems.com/products/intersystems-iris

www.circonus.com/solutions/time-series-database/

sphinxsearch.com

terminusdb.com

Technical documentation

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls

docs.circonus.com/irondb/category/getting-started

sphinxsearch.com/docs

terminusdb.github.io/terminusdb/#

Developer

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

InterSystems

Circonus LLC.

Sphinx Technologies Inc.

DataChemist Ltd.

Initial release

2008

2018

2017

2001

2018

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

2023.3, June 2023

V0.10.20, January 2018

3.5.1, February 2023

11.0.0, January 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

GPL version 2, commercial licence available

Open Source

GPL V3

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++

C++

Prolog, Rust

Server operating systems

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

AIX
Linux
macOS
Ubuntu
Windows

Linux

FreeBSD
Linux
NetBSD
OS X
Solaris
Windows

Linux

Data scheme

schema-free

depending on used data model

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

text, numeric, histograms

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

yes

full-text index on all search fields

SQL

Support of SQL

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

yes

SQL-like query language (Circonus Analytics Query Language: CAQL)

SQL-like query language (SphinxQL)

SQL-like query language (WOQL)

APIs and other access methods

Proprietary protocol

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

JDBC
ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

OWL
RESTful HTTP API
WOQL (Web Object Query Language)

Supported programming languages

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

.Net
C++
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

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

C++

unofficial client library
Java
Perl

unofficial client library
PHP
Python
Ruby

unofficial client library

JavaScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

yes, in Lua

yes

Triggers

yes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

Sharding

Automatic, metric affinity per node

Sharding

Partitioning is done manually, search queries against distributed index is supported

Graph Partitioning

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

Source-replica replication

configurable replication factor, datacenter aware

none

Journaling Streams

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 per node, eventual consistency across nodes

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

The original contents of fields are not stored in the Sphinx index.

yes

in-memory journaling

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

Role-based access control

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
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InterSystems IRIS is a complete cloud-first data platform which includes a multi-model...
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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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